Canva restructures product teams and changes its office policy, affecting 1,271 people

Canva is restructuring in changes that affect 1,271 people, according to The Verge, which published the report on 3 November 2026. The affected group accounts for 22 percent of Canva's staff. Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins announced the changes.

The company is merging its Product, Growth, and Platform teams into one product organization. Under the same plan, Sydney becomes the primary home for more of Canva's product teams. Both moves change where and how product work is directed, and they bring together reporting lines that had been kept separate.

Attendance rules are changing too. Starting in January, Canva will expect most hybrid employees to spend two to three days a week in an office. The company built much of its identity around distributed, self-serve creation tools, so a fixed office expectation is a notable change in working model. It will affect teams differently.

Departing employees will receive at least six months of salary and twelve months of healthcare coverage. Those terms set a minimum for people leaving, and they indicate that the separations are planned with a runway rather than handled as immediate exits.

In my view, the most important detail for the engineering and product community is the merger of Product, Growth, and Platform. Those three functions often pull in different directions. Product decides what gets built, Growth decides how it reaches users and what gets measured, and Platform owns the shared infrastructure both depend on. Putting them under one organization can shorten decision loops and reduce duplicated work. It also concentrates prioritization in a single chain of command. Whether that yields faster shipping or slower trade-offs will depend on how the new structure allocates platform capacity against feature and growth demands, and the announcement does not spell that out.

The broader context here is a company reorganizing around a single product line while changing how people are expected to work. A consolidated organization, a hub-based office model, and a defined severance package together suggest a plan meant to be carried out over several months rather than in one step. For engineers and product managers at Canva, and at companies watching it, the practical questions concern team boundaries, on-call and roadmap ownership, and how the Sydney hub changes the timing of collaboration across time zones.

Canva is a large, fast-growing design platform, and changes of this size tend to ripple outward. Recruiters, competitors, and partners will read the restructuring as a signal about where the company is placing its bets. The people most directly affected will need clarity about their own roles first.

The reorganization is announced, not complete. The office mandate starts in January, and the reporting structure will take shape as the consolidation proceeds. What the company does with the capacity it keeps will tell more about the plan than the headline figure does.