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What does it actually take to build the people function at a company that went from a design tool to a global platform of 5,500 people?
Jennie Rogerson, Chief People Officer at Canva, joins Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke on Truth Works for a conversation about culture as an operating system, not a perk.
Jennie's path into the role is one of the more unlikely ones in tech. She came up through hospitality, running restaurant floors where 220 covers a night meant 220 individual experiences to manage. She moved into hospitality tech, then got dragged to an after-work Canva workshop on making better presentations — and walked out convinced she had to work there.
She applied. She didn't get the jobs. A colleague told her to look elsewhere. She ignored the advice.
When the executive assistant role for co-founders Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht opened up, thousands of people applied, and Jennie had no experience in the domain. So instead of a resume, she built a website. Canva launched Canva Websites the night before she planned to send it, so she rebuilt the entire thing on the product overnight. Then she spotted a line in Cliff's LinkedIn bio — "you're great, we're hiring" — and sent it to him directly.
The interview process was two live challenges and a lot of real-time pushback. By the end of it, the role had been rewritten into something new: Leadership Operations, a chief-of-staff seat between the founders and the leadership team. Eighteen months later, Cliff called on a Sunday to offer her the top people job. Her first response was to ask if he'd lost his mind. She took it as an interim role. It's been years.
Jennie is refreshingly clear that Canva hasn't figured everything out, especially around parental leave re-onboarding, which she says most companies get wrong and hers is still actively learning. But what they have built is worth studying: managers are called coaches, performance reviews are called Growth and Impact, and every employee can anonymously submit to the Fix It Form, which has been running for roughly eight years and asks two questions — what's broken, and what's your solution.
The conversation also gets into the support playbooks Canva built for grief and loss, family and domestic violence, and cancer and long illness — written with the employees who lived through those moments, and then open-sourced so any company can use them. One of them started as a single Fix It Form submission from someone who had lost their wife.
And on hiring: Canva's CMO started as a communications intern. One of their AI researchers was found on a Discord community while he was stocking supermarket shelves. Those sit alongside senior hires from Zoom, Uber and Google — because the blend is where the value is.
TOPICS COVERED:
- Why hospitality is underrated training for building a people function
- Getting hired with a website instead of a resume
- The interview challenge that turned into a brand new role
- Being offered the top people job with no HR background
- Why culture is everyone's accountability, not the people team's
- The Fix It Form — anonymous, always on, and it requires a solution
- Why Canva calls managers "coaches" and reviews "Growth and Impact"
- What a performance cycle looks like when it isn't a box-ticking exercise
- Season openers and building public accountability into the calendar
- Parental leave re-onboarding and why nobody has solved it yet
- Building and open-sourcing the Grief and Loss guide
- Talking about family and domestic violence at work
- The risk of not talking about hard things
- Finding talent internally and hiring for curiosity over pedigree
- Using AI to draft the process, then keeping humans in the loop
Most of this episode comes back to one idea. Jennie was hired into a role she was unqualified for on paper, by people who were looking for something other than a track record. Everything she has built since runs on the same logic — the AI researcher on Discord, the intern who became CMO, the engineers she invites to tear apart her own processes because they're the ones actually living inside them.
Her closing challenge cuts both ways. If you're running an organization, the person who could take the next big step is probably already inside it, waiting for someone to bet on them. And if you're the one looking for what's next, the most interesting move might not be the logical one on paper — it might be the thing you're genuinely curious about.
Which is why the line she keeps returning to isn't really about Canva at all:
You don't join Canva to experience the culture. You join Canva to be the culture.
Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, now in the business of telling the truth about how work really works.
