Closing the Loop with Community
Systematically collect, route, ship, and close every customer request as a product engine.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Canva treats community requests as one of two core inputs to product (the other being the mission). A dedicated team tallies over a million requests a year, breaks them down, and routes them to product teams who ship and formally 'close' the loops. Each closed request is assumed to be wanted by far more people than bothered to ask, and explicit asks are complemented by watching real users hesitate and stumble.
Origin
Melanie Perkins / Canva. User-testing complement uses usertesting.com.
Core principles
- 01Product has two inputs: building toward the mission, and building what the community explicitly wants
- 02Each request represents many silent users with the same need
- 03Close loops formally so requesters see they were heard — 'it doesn't just go into a suggestion box'
- 04Explicit asks plus observed behavior (hesitation, confusion) together reveal what to build
- 05Online, unmoderated tests get franker feedback than in-room ones
How to run it
- 1
Collect requests at scale
Provide a request channel and gather everything — Canva receives over a million requests a year.
- 2
Tally, break down, and route
Have a dedicated team categorize requests and deliver them to the relevant product teams.
- 3
Ship and formally close the loop
Build the requested items and mark loops closed — Canva closed over 200 in a year, from small (gradient text) to large (a sheets product).
Pro tip Assume each closed request is loved and needed by many more people who never filled out the form.
- 4
Complement with user testing
Run user tests and watch where people hesitate to click or don't understand something, to catch problems explicit requests miss.
Pro tip Run tests online and unmoderated — people are far more frank when it's just them and their camera. Ten random people give feedback representative of very large numbers.
In the wild
Canva initially withheld AI products from teachers due to classroom hesitancy, but received so many teacher requests to use 'magic write' in the classroom that it unlocked the feature with added safety controls for teachers.
→ A community-driven feature release that matched real demand while respecting the classroom-safety concern.
Common mistakes
Treating requests as a suggestion box
If asks disappear without being shipped or closed, customers stop believing they're heard and you lose the highest-signal input into product.
Relying only on explicit asks
Explicit requests miss usability problems; without watching users hesitate and stumble, you ship features people asked for but still can't figure out.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product teams with an engaged user base wanting a repeatable demand-driven roadmap input
Not ideal for
Pre-launch products with no community yet, or pure visionary bets the market can't yet articulate
From the transcript
“we get more than a million requests from our community every year”
“this year we've closed more than 200 loops”
“we know that each one of those things is going to be loved and needed by so many more people that don't bother to actually…”
“if people hesitate clicking a button or people don't quite understand how something works”
From the episode
The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing
Melanie Perkins