Giving Away Your Legos
To let yourself and the company scale, hand off the work you're best at and find joy in enabling others
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
In a startup everything is constantly multiplying — users, employees, complexity — so the work you own today becomes impossible to hold at the next order of magnitude. Giving away your Legos means deliberately handing off the tasks you're personally identified with, building systems and teams to do them at scale, and relocating your joy from doing the work to enabling others to do it well.
Origin
The concept was originated by Molly Graham in a First Round Review article. Cameron Adams: 'Molly wrote a great article which I actually refer everyone who joins canva to.' He teaches it in Canva's cultural onboarding session.
Core principles
- 01A startup constantly changes; a traditional job rewards perfecting one repeated process. The two require opposite instincts.
- 02Every jump in scale (1M to 10M to 100M users) multiplies the complexity of a job beyond what one person can hold
- 03Self-identity and joy are built into the work you're good at, which is exactly why handing it off feels like loss
- 04Real joy at scale comes from building teams, passing on experience, and helping others do great work
- 05You give people the ability to take your Legos by giving them opportunity and support, not just instructions
How to run it
- 1
Notice the scaling multiplier on your job
Recognise when the volume or complexity of what you own is multiplying past what you can personally execute — e.g. writing every email becomes writing for 100M people across 190 countries and 100 languages.
Pro tip Use a concrete future number (10M, 100M, a billion users) to feel the impossibility of doing it all yourself.
- 2
Decide which Legos to hand off
Identify the specific tasks you currently do that block you from operating at the next level, especially the ones you're most identified with, and choose to stop doing them yourself.
Watch out You build a lot of self-identity and joy in this work — expect handing it off to feel like a loss.
- 3
Build the systems and hires that absorb the work
Instead of doing the task, design who to bring in and what processes and systems are needed (e.g. translation pipelines for 100 languages) so the work scales without you.
- 4
Relocate your joy to enabling others
Shift your source of satisfaction from personally producing the work to building a team, passing on your experience, and helping others do great writing, product, or engineering.
- 5
Give others opportunity and a push
Enable the handoff by giving people real ownership of ideas and a small push beyond their comfort zone — the best way to drive growth in your team.
Pro tip When someone brings a strong idea, tell them to go build it: 'grab a couple of people and start building video at Canva.'
In the wild
Canva's first email copywriter can write all the emails for maybe the first year. But writing for 100 million people across 190 countries and 100 languages, spanning beginner-to-expert journey stages, massively multiplies the job. Trying to write every email personally makes scaling impossible.
→ The writer must hand off writing every email, bring in help, and introduce translation systems — giving away the Lego to scale.
Adams and his co-founders took four or five years before they had another product owner who wasn't them, and about six or seven years before adopting the title 'product manager.'
→ Adams admits 'I think we took a little too long to give up our Lego on that one,' illustrating how hard the founder-level handoff is.
Common mistakes
Holding on because the work is your identity
Because joy and self-worth are tied to the craft, people cling to it and become the bottleneck to their own and the company's growth.
Delaying the founder handoff too long
Even Canva's founders admit they took too long to hand off product ownership, slowing the emergence of other product owners.
Is it for you?
Best for
Early employees and founders at a fast-scaling startup who are personally the bottleneck on work they're good at
Not ideal for
Stable roles or companies where the job genuinely is to perfect one repeated process rather than constantly scale
From the transcript
“Molly wrote a great article which I actually refer everyone who joins canva to”
“you probably need to give away some of the stuff that you're doing now in order to get to that next level”
“if you're the first email copywriter at canva you get away from writing all the emails for the first year maybe but when you're writing…”
“you often build up a lot of self-identity in doing that and you get a lot of joy out of it”
“finding joy in the other things of building a team passing on your experience helping other people do great writing or great product building or…”
“I think we took a little too long to give up our Lego on that one”
From the episode
Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and running profitably
Cameron Adams (co-founder and CPO)