# Canva turns mission goals into milestones the team can celebrate

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/canva-turns-mission-goals-into-milestones-the-team-can/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Melanie Perkins](https://realalpha.app/builders/melanie-perkins/) · Melanie Perkins is CEO and co-founder of Canva. · Co-founded Canva and leads its mission to empower everyone to design, while steering its pledge to do good.
- Host: [Lenny Rachitsky](https://realalpha.app/people/lenny-rachitsky/) · Host, Lenny's Podcast · Spent seven years at Airbnb; his product newsletter has over 1M subscribers.
- Show: Lenny's Podcast
- Episode: [She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/), Nov 2, 2025
- Moment: 16:46 to 21:57 of the episode (5 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/canva-turns-mission-goals-into-milestones-the-team-can/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1006

## Quote

> “So when we have these crazy big goals, we also have coupled them with **really fun celebrations**.”
> — [Melanie Perkins](https://realalpha.app/builders/melanie-perkins/) at [20:14](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1214) · Lenny's Podcast

## Takeaways

1. Mission pillars translate Canva’s broad aim into successive yearly goals.
2. Progress includes adding product types, languages and devices.
3. Team celebrations mark milestones along long-term goals.

## About this segment

Melanie Perkins describes breaking Canva’s mission into pillars and successive goals, from new product types to more languages and devices. She says milestone celebrations help teams recognize progress even when timelines slip.

From “She turned 100+ rejections into a $42B company | Melanie Perkins”, Nov 2, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/)

## Transcript

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

[16:50](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1010) maybe a product you launched or feature back in the day? Yeah, I mean, so many things. So we have our mission, Empower the World to Design, and we break it down into mission pillars. So empower everyone to design anything with every ingredient in every language on every device. Obviously a mouthful. But then what we do is we take successive goals every year towards this mission. And so for designing anything, we started off with social media and presentations and docs and websites and whiteboards and video.

[17:21](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1041) And so every year we're just launching more and more things to fulfill that part of the mission of empowering everyone to design anything. And then equally in every language, we started in English and then it was Spanish and then it was 20 languages and then 100 languages and then hard languages like Arabic and Hebrew and Urdu and right to left languages. And now we're in 100 plus languages now. And now we're really doubling down on the localization experience to make it feel truly local in every market around the world.

[17:47](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1067) And so you can see how having these very big audacious goals that you then just like take step after step towards helps then wheel it into existence. Or on every device, we started off obviously just with a web platform. And then we launched our iPad app and then iPhone and then Android. And then we spent years investing in cross-platforms. So we have the same feature set across every device. And so you can see how these big amorphous things that seem very outlandish, you can then just wheel into existence after continual investment for a decade. And it compounds over time. I see how all this is starting to fade together. There's this big, crazy, ambitious vision. And below there are the mission pillars that are feeding into this vision and then the crazy big goals within each of those mission pillars to measure your progress towards

[18:29](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1109) all these components of the mission. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. So with all that in mind, there's also this kind of trade-off you have to make of just how ambitious you get because oftentimes, sometimes, maybe you never miss the goal, but many times people miss these very ambitious goals. How do you just find that balance between ambitious, crazy, but doable enough where people don't get discouraged?

[18:51](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1131) I think with a crazy big goal, the thing we have been really great at is achieving them. The timeframe that we achieve them on has not always been very reliable. We have certainly not been able to have pin dart. What's the... Bullseye? We have not been very accurate with timing. But it's really interesting. I looked back at a 2021 vision deck that we made, obviously, in 2021, but it was about 2026.

[19:19](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1159) And it was fascinating to see how much we'd actually been able to achieve from that vision deck and how many things were currently still in flight. And so by having that, I thought in 2021, some of those things may have happened a little quicker. But over the last five years, they've really been coming into reality. And so we might think things are going to take six months and then they take a year.

[19:41](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1181) We might think things are going to take six months and they take two years, as has been the case. We might think something's actually going to take our entire lifetime as some of those really, truly crazy big goals. And in fact, I don't even know if we can ever achieve them, frankly. But they're such an important goal that even if you make a little step in their direction, they're worthwhile nonetheless.

[20:00](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1200) Whether you like it or not, Elon, this is similar to his. if you watch him, he has sets these really ambitious goals and then often is far late on achieving them. But clearly it has worked out and achieving the crazy things that he's achieved. Something else I hear is you celebrate these goals in a really unique way to talk about that. So when we have these crazy big goals, we also have coupled them with really fun celebrations.

[20:24](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1224) And so we attempt to make the crazy big goals happen in a moment in time. So then when we achieve them, we actually have a really fun moment. Because if you're just trying to plod towards the top of the mountain always, and you never like take a little moment to pat yourself on the back, it would feel a little arduous. And so, you know, over the years, we had all sorts of fun little celebrations where, you know, we have smashed Greek plates and released doves and had a little Automatina festival and, you know, all sorts of fun things just to take a moment with the team to celebrate that huge achievement. And so I think that that's, you know, you want to celebrate what you want to really focus on and what you want everyone to take that moment. So when you achieve that crazy big goal, when we launch in Spanish, when we hit a hundred languages,

[21:10](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1270) you know, and then the so forth across the company, taking that moment to actually pat yourself on the back and pat the teams on the back and say, hey, we did this thing, that thing that seemed really hard we've now achieved. And, you know, the mission is often, you know, each of the different mission pillars, they're obviously a long area of investment that's going to take a long time to get to. But being able to celebrate each of the rungs on that, on the way there, I think is extraordinarily important. And then it makes everyone, you know, everyone works extraordinarily hard to bring them to life. And then it gives everyone a little moment to feel proud of themselves. It'd be very motivating to get to just break a bunch of plates. I really like that. We need to bring that one back. We haven't done that one in a while.

[21:49](https://realalpha.app/v/-LywX3T5Scc/?t=1309) it's a good one uh i just love how concrete you're making this so it's you know set these crazy big