If you are planning a reorganisation around AI, Canva just published a usable template. Merge the teams that split ownership of a product, cut the layers between them, say plainly whether AI is taking the jobs, and set the exit package high enough that the announcement survives contact with LinkedIn. The restructure affects 1,271 people, or 22% of the company, through a mix of job losses, role changes and relocation requests (Bloomberg reported the same 22% on November 3). Canva has not said how many of the 1,271 actually leave.
Look past the headcount to the org chart. Most product companies will face the same structural decision once AI changes what they build and how many people it takes to build it.
What Canva Actually Changed
Canva collapsed three parallel organisations into one and moved the centre of gravity to Sydney. Per Fox Business, product, growth and platform teams merge into a single product organisation; management layers are cut, overlapping duties are combined, and narrow specialist roles are folded into broader ones. Sydney becomes the main hub for more product teams and some other departments, and some staff will be asked to move there.
The office policy changes with it. From January, most hybrid employees are expected in the office two to three days a week. Forbes Australia notes Canva once asked staff to visit their nearest hub twice a quarter and later dropped even that requirement, so this is a real reversal for a company that grew up distributed. Canva has teams in 37 countries, and the timing of consultations varies with local labour rules.
It is also Canva's first company-wide round. The Next Web, citing The Information, calls it the first round of job cuts since the 2013 founding, though Canva did cut most of its small technical writing team in 2025. A company-wide meeting is set for November 10.
Why Perkins Blamed Fragmented Ownership
Perkins's diagnosis was structural. Growth, she wrote, had split work across too many teams and "fragmented ownership"; her stated goal is to "get back to spending more time building" with "small, empowered teams." Fragmented ownership is the condition where no single team owns a customer outcome end to end: the product team owns the feature, growth owns activation, platform owns the infrastructure, and every change needs three roadmaps to agree.
The commercial trigger is plain. Canva cut its 2026 revenue growth forecast from 30% to 20% in August, and backers Blackbird and Airtree marked its valuation down 17%, from $42bn to $34.9bn. That same report says Perkins told investors demand for AI features was strong but Canva slowed the rollout to cut costs: the launch "validated the demand, but also showed us we needed to reduce the cost of completing an AI task." Second-quarter revenue was $921.9m, up 25.2%, which missed internal guidance.
Put those together and the reorg reads as a response to a specific problem: a company whose AI products cost more to serve than planned, shipping through an org chart built for the pre-AI growth curve. "After exploring a wide range of alternatives, I've come to the difficult conclusion that small changes won't be enough," Perkins wrote.
The AI Line Canva Drew
Canva explicitly denied that AI is doing the departing employees' work. "These changes are about setting Canva up to build those products, not using AI to do the work of people who are leaving," a spokesperson told reporters. Perkins's memo itself only gestures at the technology: "New technology is transforming what people can create".
The skeptical reading deserves a fair hearing. A company whose AI cost per task has fallen nearly 90% since April, and whose own CEO says AI is reshaping its products has every incentive to avoid the phrase "replaced by AI," which invites backlash from customers who are themselves designers. Fortune framed the cuts as part of a broader AI-driven rethink. Both things can be true: AI changed what Canva needs to build, and the roles going away are the coordination layers that a merged org no longer needs.
That distinction is the useful one for your own messaging. "AI replaced these jobs" and "we reorganised to build AI products" are different claims with different evidence requirements. If you make the first, you need the automation data to back it. We have covered companies that did not have it: 55% of leaders who cut staff for AI now say it was a mistake, and Meta's experiment with 50 engineers per manager ended with managers coming back.
Canva's Exit Package Is Now the Benchmark
Canva's severance sets a floor most tech companies have not offered. Every departing employee gets at least six months' salary including statutory entitlements, regardless of location. The rest of the package, per Fortune and Fox:
| Term | What Canva offers |
|---|---|
| Cash | At least six months' pay, any country |
| Healthcare | 12 months, where Canva already provides it |
| Equity | One-year vesting cliff removed for people who joined in the past year |
| Transition | Career coaching, interview prep, a year of LinkedIn Premium, 12 months of employee assistance |
| Equipment | Departing staff keep their MacBooks |
| Venture grant | US$10,000 from the Canva Collective Fund, no equity taken, applications close December 14 |
For scale, the tech-industry average severance in 2024 was 11.2 weeks, per Challenger, Gray & Christmas, as cited by Fortune. Canva's minimum of roughly 26 weeks matches the maximum Oracle offered US workers in its March layoffs. Fortune also cites an October LHH study in which 38% of US companies had made severance less generous over two years, up from 9%. Canva moved the other way. One startup CEO called the package "a master-class in how to handle layoffs," and an Australian Financial Review journalist called it "exceedingly generous."
Canva has not said how many Collective Fund grants it will award, so treat the $10,000 as a ceiling per person, not a guarantee. The vesting cliff waiver is the most copyable term: it costs little at a private company and removes the single most resented outcome for a recent hire.
What to Copy, and What to Avoid, in Your Own Reorg
The copyable part is the order of operations: diagnose the ownership problem, change the structure, then size the headcount. Canva named the failure mode first and the number second. American Express and BMW both took layers out before they had automation to replace the work, and ServiceNow shrank sales ops while growing quota-carrying sellers, which is the same logic applied to a go-to-market org.
Three risks are worth naming before you copy the template. Broader roles need people who can actually hold them, and a specialist folded into a generalist role can quietly become the bottleneck. A return-to-office mandate paired with relocation requests will push out people you meant to keep, so model attrition beyond the announced number. And merged orgs lose the checks that separate teams provided; platform reliability and growth experimentation were separate for a reason.
This Week:
- Map one product line end to end and count how many teams must agree to ship a change. If the answer is three or more, you have Canva's problem.
- Write down, in one sentence, whether AI is replacing any role in your plan, and get your CHRO and general counsel to sign off on the wording before anyone drafts a memo.
This Month:
- Price your current severance policy against Canva's floor: six months' pay, 12 months' healthcare, cliff waived. Know the gap in dollars before the board asks.
- Run a span-of-control review on every layer you plan to remove, and name who absorbs each decision that layer used to make.
Before You Announce:
- Get local-law consultation timelines for every country you operate in; Canva's vary across 37 of them.
- Set a date for the all-hands and cancel non-critical meetings for the week, which Canva did.
The Bottom Line
The last time product companies reorganised this hard was the shift to cloud and mobile, when functional orgs gave way to cross-functional squads that owned a feature in production. AI is pushing a second version of that change: fewer, broader teams that each own a customer outcome. Canva's memo supplies a structure, a line on AI disclosure and a priced exit package. Whether the structure works will show up in its growth rate, which it already cut to 20% for this year.
Before you copy the org chart, count how many teams it takes to ship one change in yours.
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