Context

Nearly every dollar of Canva's $4B annual revenue passes through a checkout flow. Free trials, upgrades, team invites, plan switches, prepaid, domains - across web, desktop, iOS, Android, and mobile web, in dozens of currencies and payment methods.

I led design end-to-end and, with no dedicated Product Manager on the project. I owned product decisions from strategy and trade-offs down to interaction details and I acted as the conduit to Finance on ARR modelling, strategy on pricing, legal on regional compliance and senior leadership for approvals. Nothing got lost between design and product because one person held both.

Checkout is where three forces collide: what users want (transparency, low friction, trust), what the business wants (conversion, higher-tier adoption, fewer failed payments), and what the platform needs (scalability, localisation, compliance). Every decision that follows is a negotiation between the three - that tension is the real subject of this case study.

But checkout at Canva isn't a flow - it's hundreds of combinations of plan, team size, country, currency and payment method, with new ones added every few weeks. So I didn't design screens, I designed the system underneath them: components that absorb a new market, language or payment type without a redesign. Build it right once and every team that touches checkout after me inherits something that holds its shape instead of breaking.