Broader roles need a sharper bar
Canva is folding narrow specialist roles into broader ones and cutting management layers. When roles get broader, the standard has to get more explicit, or the specialist knowledge leaves with the specialists.
On November 4, Canva announced a restructure affecting 1,271 people, about 22% of the company, through layoffs, role changes and relocations. It’s the first redundancy round in Canva’s history. Its product teams are merging into one product development organization, narrowly specialized roles are being folded into broader ones, and there will be fewer management layers.
That’s a design-tool company reorganizing its own product org around generalists. Three years after Meta’s “year of efficiency”, the same shape is back, and AI makes the argument for it easier: a broad person with good tools covers more of the work, so a narrow role gets harder to defend.
Where the standard lived
A specialist role was never only a job. It was where a standard lived. The accessibility specialist knew the contrast rules without looking them up. The motion designer knew why one easing felt cheap. Their review was the bar, and it worked because a particular person carried it into every room.
Fold those roles into broader ones and the people may stay, but the bar loses its home. A generalist with good tools can produce motion, copy and layout in an afternoon. Whether the motion is right is a separate question, and nobody owns it anymore.
A rule you can fail
In an org shaped around specialists, a design leader could hold quality through routing: send the work past the right reviewer. In a flat org of generalists there’s no one to route it to, so the standard has to live in the work itself.
That changes what a written standard has to be. Most design principles are written to inspire, and a generalist can’t fail them. “Motion should feel natural” passes everything. The version that survives a reorg is one a reviewer can fail you on: a contrast floor, a maximum duration, a minimum touch target. If two reviewers would reach different verdicts on the same screen, it isn’t a standard yet.
Depth a rule can’t hold
None of this makes a generalist a specialist. A written contrast rule catches the obvious failure, not the subtle one a trained eye would. Some depth goes when the role that grew it goes, and the honest move is to say which depth your product can afford to lose.
Earlier this year I wrote that org design is product design. A flatter org is a product decision too, and the first thing to design for it is the list of rules the specialists used to carry in their heads, written where the next reviewer will find it.