Goal-Driven Company Structure
Cascade a mission into pillars into yearly goals so the work you fund IS the mission.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Most companies hang a mission on the wall while the way they actually spend time and make money points in a different direction. Perkins's antidote is a goal-driven structure: the mission decomposes into mission pillars, each pillar decomposes into successive yearly goals, and achieved goals are celebrated. When the cascade holds, what you say you do and what you actually do converge — which customers experience as authenticity.
Origin
Melanie Perkins / Canva. She calls it 'a deeply underloved way of building a company.'
Core principles
- 01A mission on the wall that doesn't drive daily work is theater
- 02Break the mission into pillars, then pillars into annual goals that ladder up
- 03Authenticity comes from actually doing the thing you promise
- 04It is not an easy way to run a company, but the alignment is the payoff
How to run it
- 1
State the mission and decompose it into pillars
Take the mission ('empower the world to design') and break it into concrete pillars — for Canva: empower everyone to design anything, with every ingredient, in every language, on every device.
- 2
Set successive yearly goals under each pillar
Each year, take the next step on each pillar. 'Design anything' went social media → presentations → docs → websites → whiteboards → video; 'every language' went English → Spanish → 20 → 100+ including right-to-left languages.
Pro tip Frame each pillar's next move as the most strategically important next thing to unlock.
- 3
Verify the money and time actually serve the mission
Check that where people spend their time and how the company makes money ladders up to the stated mission rather than drifting away from it.
Watch out The common failure is the mission and the real work pointing in very different directions — audit for that gap.
- 4
Celebrate achieved goals
Mark each completed goal so teams feel the progress and the structure stays motivating.
In the wild
Under the 'on every device' pillar, Canva shipped web, then iPad, then iPhone, then Android, then spent years on cross-platform so the same feature set exists everywhere — a sequence of annual goals all laddering to one mission pillar.
→ Feature parity across devices and simultaneous collaboration, compounding over a decade into capabilities competitors lack.
Common mistakes
Mission-as-wall-decoration
When the mission sits on a page while actual time and revenue flow elsewhere, the company loses the authenticity customers can sense and the mission never gets achieved.
Assuming it's the easy path
Perkins is explicit it is 'certainly not an easy way to run a company' — leaders who expect the cascade to be low-effort abandon it before the alignment payoff arrives.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and execs building operating cadence who want strategy and daily execution aligned
Not ideal for
Tiny pre-product teams still searching for any viable direction
From the transcript
“we take successive goals every year towards this mission”
“empower everyone to design anything with every ingredient in every language on every device”
“Often people have a mission that's kind of on the wall somewhere and then what they're actually doing... is in a very very different direction”
“a deeply underloved uh way of building a company”
From the episode
The woman behind Canva shares how she built a $42B company from nothing
Melanie Perkins