October 2024: I had the opportunity to speak alongside Jessica Newton from Canva at apidays Australia 2024 in Melbourne 🇦🇺.
💎 Finding balance between distributed development and centralized governance
Canva is an online design and visual communication platform with a mission to empower the world to design anything and publish anywhere. Founded in 2013 by Melanie Perkins, a graphic designer at the University of Western Australia, Canva was created to simplify the design process and make it accessible to a broader audience. The platform has since grown to become a popular DIY-design Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, valued at $3.6 billion as of 2023.
Even as a digital native company, Canva internally struggled with scaling to meet their integration and automation needs.
The days of purchasing a monolithic software platform from a single industry giant (IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft) have passed. The software industry has undergone significant fragmentation over the past decade, driven by growing expectations of customers and employees. This has led to an explosion of applications designed to enhance user experiences. Consequently, regardless of industry, software interconnections have emerged as a crucial differentiator.
Nearly every business now faces the challenge of integrating and automating across a diverse range of applications. This typically necessitates a combination of technical expertise to address complex technical issues (left) and business acumen and agility to drive process-oriented solutions (right).
This fusion of integration and automation, complemented by AI, gives rise to Enterprise Orchestration. Successful companies are able to establish reusable patterns across the entire spectrum, facilitating faster delivery and adaptability in a rapidly evolving world.
Many enterprises, such as Canva, encounter bottlenecks and growing backlogs when operating in a centralized team mode. The industry is shifting towards a more federated model that grants business units the ability to achieve efficiencies and autonomy through a self-service approach.
Canva achieved its goal of transitioning to a distributed model by taking four fundamental steps
Step 1: Governance
The realization of a new operating model in an enterprise requires well-defined controls to extend the freedom to build integrations and automations by various teams without opening the organization to unmanaged risks to critical business applications or data.
Begin by defining governance processes that promote efficiency while ensuring that projects adhere to the best practices and standards as defined by the center of excellence (CoE). The CoE should define the governance processes encompassing the entire delivery lifecycle before handing the keys to team members. Usually, the processes are organized around every project's discovery, implementation, operations phases, and security. A few examples:
- Consistent intake and prioritization
- Design authority
- Security policies
- Development best practices
- Change management
Step 2: Composability
Reusable components should become a foundational pillar of the design philosophy, enabling teams to build solutions more efficiently and effectively. These components help streamline the development process, ensure consistency across teams, and facilitate easy updates. An initial investment into this area will pay dividends by democratizing access to a broader range of personas without compromising security.
Step 3: Assembly Line
Once the delivery process has been thoroughly tested, piloted, and becomes tedious to perform manually, introduce automation to streamline the process and enable team members to follow a standardized approach effortlessly. Leverage automation to fuel further automation initiatives. For instance, Canva implemented an assembly line that frees up team members’ time to concentrate on solving business problems rather than engaging in repetitive housekeeping tasks.
Step 4: Team Structure
Laying the foundation with the initial three steps now enables the team to scale. Educational aids assisted in upskilling team members, unlocking their delivery capacity and empowering them to apply their domain expertise to orchestrate business processes. A resource center facilitates quick onboarding of new teams and reduces the overhead required by the CoE in addressing common questions.
The new distributed delivery model is already demonstrating success through various solutions, with teams collaborating across the entire spectrum of integration and automation.
Canva created a new marketplace connector between their Workday HRIS and their new Applicant Tracking System, SmartRecruiters. This tightly integrates and automates multiple stages of the end-to-end hiring process, avoiding the need for highly complex Workday integrations.
Anaplan is automagically refreshed with data from Netsuite on a regular basis, so that Canva’s Finance team can access financial data easily and efficiently for month end reporting each month.
Canva’s business customers now get their subscriptions automatically activated or deactivated based on their payment status, saving time for their customer success team while making customers happier.
Distributed delivery with centralized governnace has empowered Canva to make it a collaborative endeavor for Business and IT to orchestrate data. In fact, it’s fostering a growth mindset among Canvanauts. When considering the growth mindset, scale mindset, and process mindset, Canva has successfully integrated these concepts into its platform. This is Canva’s greatest asset, ensuring its sustained growth.
For more on this topic, connect with Jess and me on LinkedIn. 🤗
