Canva's mission is to empower the world to design. It's a promise that scales only if the people building the product stay genuinely close to the people using it. With 4,000+ team members globally and a product used by hundreds of millions, Canva has always treated customer obsession as a core operating principle—not a department.

For a long time, though, that obsession had no real infrastructure behind it. Designers and product managers (PMs) ran ad-hoc research as needed, but insights rarely found a permanent home. New team members learned what previous teams had discovered through word-of-mouth, stumbling across relevant findings weeks or months after they could have shaped a decision. Research happened; institutional knowledge didn't accumulate. When Canva formalized its Design Research practice in early 2020, the team inherited that fragmented landscape and set about building something better. That's where Dovetail came in.

The team turned to Dovetail to build a central customer intelligence platform—one that anyone at Canva could find useful, not just trained researchers. Moderated session recordings and transcripts came in first, followed by tagging, theming, and full-text search across every project. PMs could pull up user quotes on creativity or collaboration in minutes. New designers could watch sessions to understand where users struggled with existing flows. Content designers could quickly read sentiment around specific messaging without waiting for a formal report.

That foundation's grown into something substantial. Canva now runs 200 paid seats across 7 workspaces—a research archive that spans years of customer conversations, accessible to anyone in the organization with a question worth asking.

The shift has been gradual but unmistakable. PMs now actively request Dovetail access to run their own research synthesis—not waiting for a researcher to hand them findings. Marketers pull sentiment data before drafting a campaign brief. Designers search for existing sessions before planning new rounds of fieldwork. The archive compounds: every new project makes the ones before it more valuable, and the people contributing to it are no longer just the research team.

Canva's researchers have long known that sharing a video clip lands differently than sharing a quote. Watching a user pause, backtrack, or light up at a feature communicates something a transcript can't. The team uses Dovetail's highlight and reel tools to capture those moments and bring them directly into product conversations—clipping the exact seconds that illustrate a finding and sharing them with stakeholders who weren't in the room.

PMs and designers don't wait for formal reports to see this material. A researcher can share a Dovetail highlight link via Slack the same day as a session, giving the product team early signal while the work is still in motion. That speed—from interview to shared insight—has made customer evidence a more natural part of how decisions get made at Canva.

The team's also exploring how Dovetail's MCP integration connects their research archive to broader AI workflows—using Claude to run meta-analysis across projects and surface connections across years of accumulated data. It's the start of a new kind of institutional intelligence: one where everything Canva has ever learned from its customers becomes a resource any team can draw on.

One of my favorite things is seeing people not behave the way we expect them to behave. That's research doing what it's supposed to be doing; uncovering things that we were a bit uncertain about.

— Craig Boustred, Design Researcher, Canva

The research team's ambition was never to be the sole source of customer knowledge at Canva. With a product this broad, that would be impossible. Their goal—and now a formal company priority for 2026—is to make customer understanding a shared capability: something every designer, PM, and engineer can access and contribute to.

In practice, that means training sessions, shared guides, and best practices for conducting and storing research effectively. When designers or PMs run their own interviews, they upload everything to Dovetail—feeding the collective knowledge base rather than keeping findings siloed in personal folders. The Design Research team, which recently merged with Canva's Close the Loop function, sits at the center of this effort: connecting qual research, customer feedback, and product intelligence into a single view of the customer.

The ambition runs deep. Canva's set an internal expectation that every employee—every Canvanaught—speaks to at least one customer per month. At a company building for hundreds of millions of people, that kind of closeness doesn't happen by accident. It requires a system that captures every conversation, connects every insight, and puts it in front of the people making decisions. That system is Dovetail.