Canva spent two years rewriting its editor without shipping

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 23:48

   we thought it would take about six months. It was really important because it was critical for cross platform. It was critical for right to left. It was critical because we could only have five people working in our editor at any point in time because of the way the code base was structured. and we thought it was going to take six months and then it took two years and it was two years of not shipping any product, two years of a product company not being able to ship product and like that is such a core motivation for our team is like shipping something, seeing great customer feedback and then that kind of makes everyone feel happy and like we've got momentum And it just felt like we're in a dark, dark tunnel.

2. 24:28

   We could hardly see the end of the tunnel. We didn't really know how long it was going to take because it had to take as long as the tunnel was going to take. And it was, you know, a very hard time because, you know, other people would be launching this and that. And it was, we weren't. Eventually we got out of that tunnel and it was extremely important that we did that work. We've now got two and a half thousand engineers and were able to deliver amazing things that would have just like been completely infeasible.

3. 25:03

   And simultaneous collaboration was like so many things were baked into this. But, yeah, it was not a fun period of time. A product company not shipping product is not really a recipe for fun. For two years. For two years. I feel like every builder listening to this knows exactly what you've been through and maybe not on that scale in those stakes. but you start on something oh yeah it'll be take a few weeks and then a year later you're still working on it totally how did just was the mood really uh i don't know sad internally just that must have been like two years that's a long time not to ship anything just what was it like internally during that period i think it was kind of everything internally like we we made it into a bit of a game we had this game board and i bought these little like uh rubber ducky sort of

4. 25:49

   bath toys and we had this um so we had all the little the components represented as a bath toy on this um board and there was like all these stages of like home that kind of went launched in product there was an emergency lane at the end of it was home and hosed and we like did these weekly stand-ups where everyone would come in and talk where their bath toy was at And kind of just like we tried to make it fun and for the team.

5. 26:15

   So it was partly fun and it was partly distressing as all of our investors were like, hey, you know, that thing.