#121 - Canva's Playbook: Scaling Teams, Tech, and AI with Adam Schuck // Senior Engineering Director @ Canva

alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders

Insights into hypergrowth, late-stage career frameworks, AI adoption, and the tech powering Canva's collaborative editor.

In this episode, Tobi chats with Adam Schuck, Senior Engineering Director at Canva, a company that has scaled to over 5,000 employees, 2,000+ engineers, and 230 million MAUs while remaining profitable. Adam shares his journey through startups (including acquisitions by Twitter and Canva) and large tech companies like Google, leading to his current role managing 220 engineers at Canva.

They dive deep into the challenges and strategies behind Canva's hypergrowth, including:

• Scaling engineering teams from 150 to over 2000.
• Implementing a career framework (Growth & Development Framework) relatively late at 1000+ engineers, moving beyond "minimum viable structure."
• Canva's approach to AI: Viewing it as a tailwind, fostering experimentation ("AI Impact"), providing broad access to tools (Cursor, Copilot, LLMs), and emphasizing human responsibility ("humans as shepherds").
• The core technology decisions enabling Canva's success, particularly the operational transformation logic for real-time concurrent editing and the strategic shift to a unified web-based mobile experience (WebX).
• Maintaining a startup culture of adaptability despite massive scale.
• Adam's personal productivity hacks for leaders, focusing on ruthless calendar management and clear goal setting.

TIMESTAMPS: [00:00:51] Introduction to Adam Schuck & Canva's Scale [00:03:28] Adam's Personal Nerd Journey (Full Stack, Startups, Google, Twitter) [00:10:00] Canva's Business: Growth, Revenue, and Profitability [00:11:32] AI as a Tailwind: Canva's Strategy and Magic Studio [00:15:36] From PLG to Enterprise: Evolving Canva's Go-to-Market [00:17:21] Conway's Law & Org Structure at Scale (Matrix, Groups, Specialties) [00:19:45] Defining the "Paved Road": Tech Governance and Foundations Teams [00:24:23] AI Impact: Augmenting Engineers, Tooling (Cursor/Copilot), and Responsibility [00:31:29] Implementing Career Frameworks Late: The Growth & Development Framework Story [00:42:10] Tech Secrets: Concurrent Editing (Operational Transformation) Deep Dive [00:46:24] Tech Secrets: The Journey to a Unified Mobile Experience (WebX) [00:52:26] Personal Productivity Hacks for Leaders [00:57:19] Advice to Past Self

QUOTES:

• "We recognized that maybe we were now at the point where it was actually causing more harm than good to not have these kind of frameworks and structure in place." - Adam Schuck [00:33:50]
• "We're really clear with our messaging to our engineering team that we don't, we're not entitling our team to abdicate themselves of responsibility. That ultimately every line of code that is shipped at Canva, it's a person responsible for that." - Adam Schuck [00:28:46]