Canva Co-Founder: The AI Playbook Behind the World's Most Popular Design Tool | Cameron Adams
Prototype-first product development, why AI owns the first mile, and the stories behind Canva's famous rubber ducky and an accident that changed Cam's life
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a new episode with Cameron Adams.
Cameron is the co-founder for Canva where people are creating 1B+ designs every month. We talked about how AI will transform design and why he believes in prototypes over PRDs and coaches over managers. I also loved hearing Cam’s stories about Canva’s rubber ducky and what a bike accident taught him about persistence.
Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
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Cameron and I talked about:
(00:00) Will AI democratize design?
(06:32) How Canva runs AI evaluations for its product
(10:17) Moving beyond chat boxes to visual AI interfaces
(22:23) Why Canva skips PRDs and goes straight to prototypes
(29:08) The rubber duck Easter egg that became a cultural icon
(33:13) Keeping craft and quality as a priority as the team grows
(35:32) Why Canva gives everyone executive coaching, not just managers
(39:23) How AI is blurring boundaries between PM and design
(43:26) The bike accident story that almost derailed Canva's launch
How Canva AI gets you from zero to one
Welcome Cameron! So people are already creating 1B designs a month on Canva. How will AI make this easier?
Great question.
I think of Canva AI as a tool to get from zero to one quickly.
You can use it to draft social posts, presentations, documents, and prototypes all in a single conversational AI interface. You can get to 80% completion using AI and then lean on the rest of Canva for the final mile – tweaking text, changing colors, uploading specific images.
How does Canva AI work behind the scenes?
We've had something like Canva AI for about 3 years now. We started with Magic Design, which you used specifically for creating designs. We've graduated to a more general model that can take any input and figure out where you need to go.
Behind the scenes, the conversational elements of our chat interface are powered by OpenAI’s APIs, with our own builds on top. When you submit a text query, we proceed in two steps:
Understand your intent. Do you want to make an image, design, document, or prototype?
Route you to the right AI model. For example, if your intent is to create images, we use Leonardo’s Phoenix model (a company we acquired). If your intent is to create designs, we use our own model since design is our bread and butter.
What kind of AI evaluations do you do for this product?
When it comes to evaluations, our principle is to start narrow, then expand.
We focused on social media templates first because that's where people needed quick inspiration. We measure when users download designs or move into the Canva editor as a sign of a successful social media generation.
Once we had quality social media generations, then we expanded to more design types. For example, presentations are more complex to evaluate because they involve lengthy multi-page narrative experiences.
Beyond chatbots to visual AI interfaces
I think one of Canva’s biggest differentiators is how simple and approachable it is to use. How did you apply this principle to Canva AI?
We've all gotten used to AI chatbots to start conversations, but particularly in the visual realm, we've seen that people often don't have the vocabulary to express their ideas in text prompts. That’s why:
We designed Canva AI so it gets you to the first mile and then you can make edits more precisely using a visual interface.
For example, when you're working with presentations, telling AI to change one word on slide 15 is really cumbersome. But being able to do that by pointing and clicking is super valuable.
We've also worked this approach into our conversational interface. When you're generating, you can have a full-screen conversation. But once you create a visual artifact, we make it easy for you to tweak it directly by clicking on text, changing colors, or going fully into the Canva editor.
Prototype-first product development
How has AI changed your product development process?
We've always been very visual thinkers at Canva. Instead of a PRD, we like having a signed off set of visuals before starting development.
For the first decade of Canva, we used mostly static visuals. But honestly, I've always been a huge fan of prototypes because I have both design and CS backgrounds. I love to use interactive prototypes to test my assumptions about how the product will feel.
But not everyone on the team has had those skills. Designers often only worked in the visual realm and had to rely on engineers for prototyping. Sharing context between two people also takes time.
That’s why I love the vibe coding movement.
Letting anyone build prototypes – whether they’re a PM, designer, or engineer – is a game changer for testing ideas quickly without waiting for the full production cycle.
Do you then share the prototypes with users?
Yes, we're super optimized for user testing and research. We want all our designers and PMs putting stuff in front of potential customers as early as possible.
You know, with static mockups, you have to guide people through it—"this mockup is doing this, you're now on this screen, what would you do?" It becomes very manual and biased because you're guiding someone throughout.
But with prototypes, users can click around like it's a real app and you can observe their behaviors in a non-biased way. You can see what people do, come back the next day with fixes, and then retest our hypothesis.
Yeah you can just tell AI to update the prototype based on user feedback.
Exactly. Making sure the prototype is kept up to date with the latest learnings is really important, and it's becoming easier to do that with AI.
Canva’s rubber ducky easter egg that defines its culture
Let’s switch gears a bit. I’d love to hear about your famous rubber ducky easter egg and why it’s important to your company culture.
Sure, so every time you upload 100 images, a duck floats by on our upload indicator.
This little Easter egg that has come to represent our high bar for user delight and excellence.
The story behind it is that in the early days, we didn’t have an upload indicator. You'd drag an image in and then 5 seconds later your image would appear. We wanted to give users feedback that their upload was still working during those 5 seconds.
So I designed an upload indicator and asked Patrick Lee, one of our frontend engineers, "Can you make it fill up like water as it gets to 100%?” Patrick pushed it to production in a few hours and I didn’t think much more about it afterwards.
Two weeks later, we started getting all these reports from users about rubber ducks and I was thinking: 'What the hell are people talking about? There are no rubber ducks in Canva.”
Finally, someone in the office saw it – the little rubber duck that floated by on the upload indicator. Pat saw my wobbly, watery upload indicator and thought "It's kind of cool but I want to add a little extra touch of whimsy." He put in the rubber duck as an Easter egg, didn't tell anyone, and shipped it.
The reaction we got from people was amazing. A very small subset of our power users saw it, but when they did, it created this incredible connection. They feel like they're part of something special because they interacted with the product so many times. To this day, I still use the rubber ducky as an example of putting love and care into our product.
It’s about thinking about these moments of delight where you can make the product better and more human.
Part of Canva's success has been our approachability, the feeling that we've built this product just for you. Little touches like the rubber duck let you know it's not some monolithic robot delivering product via the internet. It's actually a team of people in Sydney and all over the world creating a product they love and want you to feel the love as well.
That permeates our brand and makes people fall in love with Canva. If you search for "Canva love" on Twitter, you get an incredible number of people who feel that passion and bring that to the product. That word of mouth, organic growth is what powered us to 1 billion designs monthly.
The emotional part of product-led growth isn't talked about enough.
That’s an incredible story. How do you keep this culture of craft alive as you scale?
You have to do it across different levels:
Talk about it constantly. You need to hero it, point it out to people. As with any message, you need to say it at least 10 times before it gets through.
Lead by example. Anytime I dive into the product, I try to push teams to include these moments of delight.
Empower decision-making. Our "empower others" value means giving people the agency to make these choices themselves.
Create space for whimsy. Not everything has to push a metric directly. We encourage teams to have fun.
Why Canva gives every employee coaching, not just managers
You also offer professional coaching for all employees, instead of just execs or managers. That’s pretty unheard of – why do you do it?
We had some pretty pivotal experiences with coaching early on as founders so being able to democratize coaching was important to us.
We figured out a system where you have a coach at Canva who helps with:
Collaborative goal-setting rather than top-down mandates
Holistic person development beyond just work skills
Regular planning cycles for 6-12 month growth trajectories
Personal and professional skills development frameworks
We call it "coaching on purpose" because it isn't managing. It really is about thinking about the person holistically and giving them plans where they can identify skills they want to work on—both personal and professional.
How many coaches do you have now at Canva?
We have over 1,000 coaches across Canva – many of whom are our employees. For example, we have:
Senior PMs coaching within their teams
Designers developing other designers
Principal engineers mentoring technical growth
Any employee can sign up to be a coach and we provide ongoing training programs and toolkits for them.
Have you thought about including AI in coaching?
That's a fantastic suggestion. Individually, lots of our coaches have started figuring out their own ways to use AI tools in their coaching relationships. I'm sure coaches are also using AI to coach themselves in between times where they don't have face time with their coach.
It's not yet something we've integrated fully into the coaching program, but it's a great prompt for me to move that along.
How AI is blurring the boundaries between PM and design
How else do you think AI will change how you build products at Canva?
The key changes we're seeing include:
Shared language development. Teams speak more of a common vernacular around problems because they’re consulting AI.
Universal prototyping ability. Everyone can create working demos, not just engineers.
Faster testing. Ideas become tangible prototype you can test immediately rather than through long documentation cycles.
Cross-functional problem solving. We’re seeing less role-based silos and more collaboration between PMs, designers, and engineers.
Nobody likes too many meetings but some of the most fun that I’ve had involved sketching on whiteboards. Now everyone can work on a prototype together – we've seen a lot of energy from our product teams because they're all getting involved more and getting reinvigorated with the problem spaces they're tackling.
Maybe the PRD will finally die. We can just write some edge cases and notes around the prototype instead.
Exactly.
We've dealt with these layers of abstraction (PRDs, designs, etc) when really you just want the shortest path from idea to something in front of your customers.
We've built up years of processes based around the tools we have at our disposal. When you have something that enables you to go from your brain to shipped code to customers, embrace it!
Cameron’s bike accident that almost derailed Canva's launch
I’d love to wrap up by asking you about your accident right before the initial launch of Canva all those years ago. I think it’s an incredible story.
So we'd been working on Canva for about a year and it was the Saturday night before our big product reveal.
I was biking home after coding all day. I came down a hill and this taxi just came out of nowhere and t-boned me. I flew over the hood, blacked out, and woke up in the middle of the road. A bouncer from a nearby pub had come over and stopped four lanes of traffic. I was dazed and honestly had blood in my mouth.
Before I knew it, I was in an ambulance. I went to the hospital and had to get stitches, but we needed code shipped for the launch on Tuesday.
So I was back in the office on Sunday coding. Fortunately, we managed to get all the code done by Tuesday morning and our launch went fine.
What motivated you to do this? Most people would just go home and rest.
I did it because I didn’t want to let my team down. They were the ones who called the ambulance and sent me to the hospital.
It’s cliche to say but I also just really believed in our vision. I truly believed that putting design in the hands of everyone will have an amazingly positive impact on their lives and their world.
That Tuesday is when we got our very first user. It was a slow journey—we only got about 100 people that first night. But word about the product grew. We had 1,000 people by the end of the week, 5,000 by the end of the next fortnight, and 25,000 by the end of the month.
But at the end of the day, it’s about the team. You can't have a great product without a great team.
Thank you so much Cameron! If you enjoyed this interview, follow Cameron on LinkedIn and start creating with Canva AI.