Canva restructuring affects 22% of staff, with layoffs, relocations and a Sydney product hub

What Canva announced

Canva is carrying out a restructuring that touches 1,271 people, or 22 percent of its staff, according to The Verge. Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins announced the changes on November 3, telling employees that some will be moved into different roles, some will be asked to relocate to centralized hubs, and others will be let go.

Refounding around smaller teams

In her note to staff, Perkins said that after weighing a wide range of alternatives, she concluded that incremental adjustments would not be enough to position the company for the next decade. Instead, she framed the move as a way of founding the company anew, returning to its origins in small, empowered teams that have the freedom to make decisions, take ownership, and concentrate on what matters most to users.

In practice, that means folding Canva's Product, Growth, and Platform groups into a single product organization, reducing layers of management, and merging responsibilities that had overlapped across teams. Sydney will become the primary home for a larger share of the product organization, as well as for roles in other specialties where shared context and close collaboration are viewed as especially important.

A tighter office policy

The overhaul also extends to where people work. Starting in January, most employees on hybrid arrangements will be expected to spend two to three days per week in an office, with the precise expectation varying by what makes sense in each area, The Verge reports.

For employees who are leaving, Canva said it will offer at least six months of salary, twelve months of healthcare coverage, and career support resources.

Part of a wider wave

Canva's announcement came just one day after Squarespace disclosed layoffs affecting 19 percent of its own staff, according to The Verge. Back-to-back cuts of that scale at two well-known website and design tools companies underline how aggressively consumer software firms are reworking their headcount and organizational structures.

It is also worth noting what is absent from Canva's stated rationale. As reported by The Verge, the reasons given are organizational — team size, reporting layers, and physical co-location — rather than an explicitly framed cost-cutting drive or an AI-driven efficiency program, even as workforce restructuring across the software industry is frequently discussed in the context of AI's impact on how products are built.

Why it matters

A restructuring that affects more than a fifth of a company's workforce is a major event for a firm of Canva's prominence, and the details matter beyond one company. The consolidation of product work in Sydney and the new two-to-three-day office expectation represent a shift away from the distributed, flexible working arrangements that many software companies adopted in recent years, and they will test how much leverage employers have in pulling remote staff back toward physical hubs.

The move also illustrates that even profitable, widely used software products are not insulated from deep organizational redesigns. Whether the driver is collaboration, cost discipline, or pressure from a changing market, Canva's decision to rebuild around smaller teams — and to shrink or relocate a large share of its staff to do it — will be a data point other technology companies watch closely as they plan their own structures for the coming decade.