IN PRACTICE: Designing Customer Experiences That Scale — Lessons from Canva’s CCO, Rob Giglio
Most GTM leaders talk about being “customer-obsessed,” but few can operationalize it at enterprise scale. Rob Giglio, CCO of Canva—and former leader at Adobe, DocuSign, and HubSpot—has spent his career doing exactly that. His approach reveals a shift that mirrors a broader theme: durable growth comes from designing systems around the customer, not around the company.
Build the System Around How Customers Think, Not How Teams Operate
Giglio argues that most GTM motions break because they’re built from the inside out—organized around internal milestones rather than customer decision points. At Canva, he flips that paradigm.
His team maps experiences using the customer’s language (“What problem are you trying to solve?”) rather than the company’s (“Which stage are you in?”). This creates alignment across marketing, sales, and success—and ultimately, smoother, more predictable revenue motion.
The Power of a Single Shared Framework
Throughout the interview, Giglio points to the same unlock: one shared process and one shared language.
At Canva, that anchor is the SPICED framework.
It prevents teams from reinventing the wheel, reduces friction between functions, and ensures every handoff is rooted in customer intent. Giglio emphasizes that this is what allows a company at Canva’s scale to maintain cohesion across hundreds of moments in the customer journey.
Customer Signals > Internal Signals
What sets Canva apart is how deeply it listens. Rather than overwhelming customers with choice or internal assumptions, Giglio’s teams rely on usage patterns, JTBD insights, and real customer signals to refine experiences.
This is how Canva builds an onboarding motion that works across solopreneurs, global teams, and enterprise design departments—while maintaining simplicity for all.
A Philosophy of “Substance Over Sizzle”
Giglio’s mantra—substance over sizzle—runs counter to the conventional wisdom of hyper-polished GTM. His belief:
When the product does the heavy lifting, growth teams can focus on clarity, not complexity.
That philosophy shaped Adobe’s shift from packaged software to SaaS, DocuSign’s pandemic-era recovery, HubSpot’s inbound expansion—and now, Canva’s multi-segment PLG strategy.
What’s most intriguing is how Giglio blends PLG, enterprise rigor, and AI-enabled automation into a unified operating system—a system that may foreshadow what the next generation of customer experience design will look like.
– Bottom Line –
Rob Giglio’s playbook shows that scalable growth isn’t about bigger teams or louder messaging—it’s about building a simple, shared system shaped entirely around the customer’s world, not your own.
These insights are from a recent interview by Winning by Design CGO, Lauren Goldstein. The full interview can be found in our Growth Journal - subscribe here.
