Canva Restructures 1,271 Roles, but Manila’s Impact Remains Unclear

Canva is cutting or relocating 1,271 roles, roughly 22 percent of its workforce, in the largest restructuring in the design platform’s thirteen-year history. The scale is clear; the local effect isn’t. Canva has not said how many employees in Manila are affected, even as it plans to concentrate more product teams in Sydney and move some staff to central hubs.

Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins shared the changes with staff in a note published on the company newsroom on November 3. She described the past year as the company’s hardest yet and said growth had slowed for the first time in a decade. In her view, incremental adjustments wouldn’t address the problem: Canva needs to “refound” itself around smaller, empowered teams, rather than the layers it accumulated as it grew.

Manila is a major part of Canva’s workforce

The announcement covers teams in 37 countries, but it doesn’t identify which locations will see the largest reductions or relocations. Manila isn’t mentioned in the memo, so there’s no confirmed headcount for the Filipino team or detail about how its roles might change.

The uncertainty matters because Manila is an established Canva hub, not a small satellite office. The company opened its first office outside Australia there in 2014, with a team of seven. It now says more than 1,000 Canvanauts work in the Philippines from a campus in Makati City. Canva says the process will follow different local requirements and timelines, which means employees in different countries may get information at different times. As of the announcement, the local team had not shared how many Filipino employees were affected.

Sydney will become the primary home for more product teams, while some employees are being asked to relocate to centralized hubs. That points to a geographic reshaping alongside the job reductions. For Manila staff, the practical questions are still open: which teams will move, which roles will stay, and whether relocation will be an option for people whose work is assigned to another hub.

One product organization, broader roles and more office time

Canva is combining Product, Growth and Platform into a single Product Org. The company says this should reduce handovers and make ownership of larger problems clearer. The change also implies fewer boundaries between groups that previously worked in separate parts of the organization.

Alongside that merger, Canva plans to reduce subspecialization, bring narrow roles into broader ones and flatten management layers. For employees, those changes could alter reporting lines and the range of work attached to a role, even where a position isn’t cut. The company’s stated goal is to give smaller teams more responsibility, but how that will work across particular teams will depend on the new structure.

The third part of the plan concerns where colleagues work. Canva wants closely connected teams in the same locations and expects more in-person collaboration. From January, most hybrid employees are expected to work from an office around two to three days a week, depending on their area. The company hasn’t specified one schedule that applies to every team.

Support for employees leaving

People whose roles are cut or relocated will receive at least six months of salary, including statutory entitlements, regardless of location. Canva is also removing the one-year vesting cliff for recent joiners. Where the company provides healthcare, coverage will continue for twelve months, and the employee assistance program will remain available for twelve months with family members included.

The package also includes career coaching, interview preparation and a year of LinkedIn Premium. Departing employees can opt into an alumni directory that Canva plans to share with investors and partners. They can keep their company-issued MacBook, a detail the company linked to the fact that not everyone has a personal laptop available.

Canva is offering a separate Canva Collective Fund for people who want to start a project of their own. The fund provides grants of US$10,000, with interest due by December 14. Canva says it will take no ownership or equity in what recipients build.

What employees will learn next

Affected staff are being offered individual meetings with a senior leader in their area. Canva has scheduled a company all-hands for November 10, followed by sessions at the organization level from November 11. Those meetings should give employees more detail about team structures and individual outcomes, though the company hasn’t provided a Manila-specific timetable.

For now, the headline number describes the global restructuring, not its local distribution. Manila’s size and history at Canva make the unanswered questions significant for employees there, but the available details don’t establish how many roles will be cut, relocated or retained. The next useful update will be one that spells out the plan by team and location.