Should I Hire A Specialist Or A Generalist? Canva Just Paid To Undo Its Own Answer

Hire the generalist first. Narrow the role when the work outgrows one person, not when the org chart looks thin. Canva has just bought that lesson at considerable expense, against everything a founder is told that growing up looks like. We build the system for running a team across countries, so take what a borderless HRIS is for as a disclosure.

The headline number is the least interesting part.

What Melanie Perkins actually told 1,271 people

On Tuesday 3 November the Canva chief executive told staff that 1,271 people, 22 per cent of the company, would be affected. The memo, published in full by Business Insider, puts the reason in one of its own section headings: reducing subspecialisation and collapsing layers to broaden ownership.

Her reason sits underneath. Canva kept dividing work into narrower subspecialties and teams, which she says built valuable expertise and “also fragmented ownership and made it harder to see the full picture, with different teams responsible for many pieces of the same work.”

Canva is not cutting because it ran out of work. It is cutting because the work had too many owners.

Why a specialist feels like the grown-up hire

At twelve people everyone does three jobs and you call it scrappy. At thirty you hire one person per discipline, the way the companies you admire do. One owns paid acquisition, one lifecycle, one the data the other two argue about.

Each hire is defensible alone. The accumulation is the problem, and nobody books it as a decision because it never arrives as one. Startup Daily reported that Perkins is merging Product, Growth and Platform into one organisation. Three owners becoming one, because improving one part of the product meant moving between all three.

What does the wrong shape cost to undo?

Canva has committed to at least six months of salary for everyone affected, inclusive of statutory entitlements, wherever they are. It has not said how many of the 1,271 leave, so the total cannot be worked out from outside, and anyone quoting a figure has guessed it.

The shape survives that gap. Half a year of pay, per person, across a fifth of a company, to change how roles are drawn. Halve the salary of the narrowest role on your team and you have Canva’s price for the same mistake, per head. You do not have its balance sheet, and what an Australian tech team costs per head is the other half of the sum.

Distance is not what fragmented the ownership

Perkins wrote something else a founder with people in Manila will read the wrong way. Working across countries, she said, has brought enormous benefits and talent, and has also made it harder to bring the right people together on complex problems. Some roles move to hubs.

As a verdict on distributed teams that is wrong. It describes coordinating a workforce across 37 countries. Six people in Manila under one owner do not have that problem, and managing staff you did not hire yourself is a different skill from managing a continent of them.

Splitting the work fragments ownership. Distance only makes it visible sooner.

The honest counter is that specialisation worked

Perkins concedes it in the same sentence she disowns it: the subspecialties built valuable expertise. Narrow roles are a stage rather than an error, and Canva reached it after a decade of growth, at a size where 1,271 people is a fifth of the company.

Is there a point where the specialist is right?

Yes, and it has a test. A role earns its narrowing when one person can show you a queue they cannot clear, week after week, not a job description that looks tidier split in two.

Related reading

• How do I know my offshore staff are actually working?
• Which parts of a digital agency can be done from another country

Count the owners before you count the heads

Count who must agree before your next change ships. More than two, and you have built Canva’s problem at a fraction of the scale without Canva’s budget for fixing it. So should I hire a specialist or a generalist is the wrong order of question. Ownership first, headcount second.

If the role was always one broad job, sign up and scope it properly in the country you want it done from. Which role would you merge back together if nobody was watching?