How Canva uses Marlee to unlock team potential at scale

‍

To scale its bold vision of democratizing design and redefining creative work, Canva needed a solution that could grow with its people—from a tight-knit team of 600 to a global workforce of more than 5,000. As Canva transformed how the world designs, it also reimagined how teams collaborate, lead, and grow. That’s where Marlee comes in. Embedded across onboarding, one-on-ones, coaching, and leadership development, Marlee helps Canva teams unlock motivation, build deep team insight, and fuel a performance culture at scale. With Marlee’s Motivational Analysis and success models, Canva turns self-awareness into a strategic advantage, keeping innovation human, connected, and high-performing.

‍

About Canva:

One of the world’s fastest-growing tech unicorns, Canva is revolutionizing how people communicate visually. Its intuitive drag-and-drop platform empowers anyone, from first-time creators to global teams, to design everything from presentations to social media graphics. With a vast library of templates, images, illustrations, and AI-powered tools, Canva makes professional design fast, collaborative, and accessible to all.

Industry: Online design and publishing platform‍
Website: https://www.canva.com
‍Employees: 5,000+

‍

Challenges:

Canva’s growth journey—from a founding team of three in 2013 to more than 5,000 employees across nine countries in just over a decade—brought enormous opportunity and an equally ambitious challenge: how to preserve and scale its high-performing, people-first culture. As Canva expanded to offices in London, Prague, Vienna, Austin, San Francisco, Manila, Beijing, Wuhan, and across Australia, it became critical to maintain team connection, empower individual growth, and ensure every employee could thrive.

To do this, Canva needed a way to attract top talent, scale high-performing teams with strong communication and collaboration, and support each person in loving what they do. Their overarching people strategy centered on helping every individual, coach, and team achieve peak performance, well-being, and happiness at work. This meant giving leaders and coaches better insight into their unique work styles, while building a shared language to deepen Canva’s understanding of culture, motivation, and team dynamics at scale.

‍

Solution:

Since 2017, each new Canva team member has been invited to “opt in” to their Marlee Canva account during onboarding, helping them better understand themselves while giving mentors a head start in building connection and communication. What started with Canva’s most passionate internal coaches quickly spread across the organization.

"Two years ago when we first launched Marlee, we rolled it out to the most passionate coaches that were really wanting to drive self-discovery and learning about themselves and the team. So when we then did the launch to everyone else in the team, there was already a buzz around what was Marlee and how could we use it. We ended up having a 98% uptake, which was really good. It’s a way for us to get to know each other on a deeper level, in a way that helps us to work better together and achieve goals."
—Linda Lin, HR Team Happiness, Canva

Marlee is now used across the entire employee journey: in new team formation, one-on-ones, growth and development conversations, internal coaching programs, and Canva University.

It also provides company-wide motivational insights to Canva, known internally as a Culture Map. This map helps teams understand the unique mix of attitudes and work styles that shape Canva’s culture across Australia, the US, the Philippines, and China. These insights are compared to Marlee’s success models for both start-up and scale-up phases, helping Canva identify cultural strengths and uncover blind spots as the business scales.

“We’ve been using Marlee since October 2017, and have implemented it across our entire organization in onboarding, as well as when forming new teams, to help us understand our team and the dynamics between them. In our commitment to help our team grow and develop, Marlee helped us to launch a successful internal coaching program. Coaching has proven to be a great way to help our leaders scale themselves, as Canva scales.”
—Melanie Perkins, Co-founder and CEO, Canva

‍

Results:

Marlee has become a core asset at Canva, supporting the unique talents of individuals and teams, fostering a diverse and inclusive culture, and helping Canva pursue its boldest goals. It plays a vital role in keeping Canva’s people strategy human, scalable, and grounded in what matters: team happiness, well-being, and continual growth.

“Marlee is a great instrument for a coachee, or a team, to understand themselves, and it opens up a whole new level of understanding, of psychological safety and trust, which then allows the team to embrace one another and their differences, and to pinpoint what their greatest opportunity is for growth and development.”
—Sarah Nanclares, Global Internal Coaching Lead, Canva

As further recognition of its people-first approach, Canva was named on BuiltIn’s 2024 Best Places to Work.

‍

Future:

Canva will continue to use Marlee to onboard new team members, spin up new teams, support internal coaching and Canva University, and scale its unique culture. The platform also helps new hires understand individual and team work styles, and how to collaborate and harmonize as a unit.

“I have personally gained a lot from Marlee. It has really helped me understand the way I work, as well as my blind spots. It helps me work better with others, as I now understand their key drivers and strengths. Marlee has become a central component of our people growth strategy at Canva and will empower us to harness our unique culture and optimize performance as we scale the team.”
—Cliff Obrecht, Co-founder and COO, Canva

‍

Why Marlee:

Easy to access, free for individuals, and scalable across a fast-growing global workforce
A revolutionary performance OS and AI-powered coaching technology to support team success
Helps teams understand and align around what drives them, boosting collaboration, performance, and trust
Empowers leaders, coaches, and co-founders to communicate, collaborate, and lead with clarity as the company scales
Strengthens hiring, team formation, and culture-building efforts by surfacing motivational data from day one