Cameron Adams: evaluation

Transcript context

…We talked about product for a little bit. I want to spend a little time on product management. I'm curious just how you think about product management. There's this constant debate across tech companies about the value of PMs. Are we better with more PMs? Are there too many PMs? What do PMs do for you? You're a chief product officer. Where do you find product managers bring the most value to Canva? And then do you just have thought on the future of the field of product management? I don't know. It's one of those things that I don't want to quantify. I don't want to put it in a box and say this is product management. Because I've worked at a few places now. I've actually only had one real job, which was at Google where I got to experience product managers the Google way. And the way that they do product management is totally different to the way that we do it at Canva, and that's partially by design because I didn't want to do product management like they did at Google, and that's because of the different cultures that they have. Google's a fantastically engineering-driven culture and the way that they think about product management is mostly in the technical sense of like, "Here's a piece of technology, what can that technology do, how do we scale it?" At Canva, we focus a lot on experience and as I said before, it's a very visual experience, so we require a different product management process, but also a different product management mindset. I think we probably did that more from the ground up than a lot of other startups just because Mel and Cliff were a lot less, I think, inculcated into how product management has done other places. I had a bit of experience from Google but was still fairly independent in my thinking, so we almost went back to first principles on how product management should be done, and to be honest, we didn't want to have the term product manager for a long, long time. It wasn't until about year '06 or '07 where we actually had product managers, we decided to cave just because it was easier to explain to people. But it also took us four or five years before we even had another product owner who wasn't us. Part of that was us giving up our Lego, and I think we took a little too long to give up our Lego on that one, but the other part of it was us figuring out exactly what we wanted and how we built product and how to communicate that to someone else and get them to do it in a similar way and work with the teams in the way that we did. For us, product managers are really connectives. They connect the team, ideas, data, a whole bunch of different things, and it's very messy. There's no exact recipe for how to do it, but connecting these disparate areas and moving the team and the technology and our customers to a new place, a new vision is essentially what product managers do, and it's going to involve compromise, it's going to involve changes in the feature scope, it's going to involve timelines of like, "Okay, we can't ship it in May, it's going to have to be July. Let's figure out what we can do with marketing to make that work." This constant movement and connection and reorienting around the constraints that have suddenly arisen in the last week, and that's where we see great product managers operating in Canva. You mentioned Mel and Cliff. For folks that don't know, they're the other two co-founders of Canva and they were dating when they were starting Canva, I think it was called Fusion Books back in the day before Canva. Now, they're married. What's it like working with a married couple as the other two co-founders, and is there something they did well that didn't make you feel like this third wheel person that isn't married to them?…

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