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Look at the bricks around you. How high can you stack them? Most planning works this way.
Dream of the castle on the hill first. What future do you actually want? Then work backward.
"Most planning is often done by looking at the bricks and trying to stack them, and then you can create only so much."
Every idea at Canva starts at the chaos end. Each step adds clarity until it ships.
Write the idea down. It goes from your head to paper.
Create a pitch deck. Others can now see your thinking.
Turn it into designs, then a prototype.
Ship it. The idea is now real and visible to everyone.
"How do you go from chaos to clarity? You add clarity."
Canva's front-end rewrite was supposed to take 6 months. It took 2 years. No new product shipped in that time.
"A product company not shipping product is not really a recipe for fun."
They made it into a game: rubber ducky bath toys on a board, weekly standups tracking each component. "It was partly fun and partly distressing. It was bonding, let's say."
The rewrite unlocked cross-platform, right-to-left languages, and let 2,500 engineers work on the editor simultaneously.
All figures stated in the episode by Melanie or Lenny.
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