The Most Useful Tool in Your Product Tech Stack Is…Canva?!
While we’ve all been obsessing over ChatGPT and Claude, Canva has been slowly plotting to take over the world.
Perhaps not literally, but the Australia-based design company is definitely going after a number of functions outside the design space - from marketing and UX to product and development.
I tuned in to the Canva Create event earlier this year where the company announced its most significant feature releases yet - and yes - they’re pointing their arrow at some of your favourite product tools.
From Canva Sheets, to its new Whiteboarding feature, to its very own prompt-based coding feature, here are my top three Canva tools that you didn’t know existed, that you will never be able to live without again.
Canva Whiteboards
As a longstanding Miro fan, I was ecstatic to see that my favourite design tool had launched a Whiteboarding feature. And, let me tell you, it’s pretty good.
Canva’s whiteboard tool allows you to create a wide range of product framework diagrams, workshops and feature prioritization visuals.
I suspect that Canva’s whiteboard will become a popular tool for building product roadmaps, which are easy enough to create from scratch using Canva’s Element Library or by working off a template, and for building workflows.
I primarily rely on whiteboard tools for building out my product roadmap (helpful when I need to drag things around the board to see how they fit into this quarter or that one), and for creating workflows.
Below, you’ll see one of Canva’s templates for a product roadmap that I’ve pasted into an empty Whiteboard. I’ve tweaked the colours and made the margins wider (I personally prefer detailed roadmaps), but otherwise this roadmap has everything I need - quarterly breakdown, categorization, time blocking, you name it.
I personally found Canva’s whiteboard tool very easy to maneuver. The interface is similar to Miro, in that clicking on one side of a shape allows you to connect it to an existing shape or a new, identical shape. Moving those shapes around will move the connecting line as well.
Below, you’ll see one of Canva’s workflow templates pasted into my Whiteboard, though it actually comes with quite a few.
For my roadmap, I preferred to start from the template, whereas for the workflow, I opted to work from scratch.
Canva Sheets
As someone who toggles between Google Sheets and Jira all day, I was intrigued (and pleasantly surprised) to see Canva stepping into the spreadsheet space with Canva Sheets. Spoiler: it’s not just a table - it’s a visual-first productivity tool.
Canva Sheets combines the structure of a spreadsheet with Canva’s signature design flexibility. You can build visually engaging project trackers, content calendars, campaign planning docs, or even product metrics dashboards, with far more customization than you’d get in traditional spreadsheet tools.
I suspect Canva Sheets will become a go-to for visually-oriented product managers who want something cleaner and more design-friendly than a typical Excel grid. It’s especially great for displaying data in an interactive way that’s shareable.
It’s become my go-to for creating visually appealing customer feedback reports that I can quickly share with the rest of my team.
I’ve used Canva Sheets to create a shareable feedback analysis, content pipeline dashboard and a launch checklist, and each time the experience is as refreshingly intuitive as we’ve come to expect from Canva. The templates gave me a great starting point, but it was the ability to easily tweak colors, fonts, and visuals that made it stand out.
Below, you’ll see one of the templates from the library. You’ll note that the graphs sitting front and centre are directly connected to the table below. Just like Excel or Sheets, changing a number in this Canva template will directly impact the presentation of the graphs.
Canva Code
I’ve long preferred Canva to other design and production tools because of its ability to simplify complicated tasks, such as email header design, podcast production and landing page creation.
While I’ve come to expect that Canva could simplify anything, I didn’t expect the company to throw its hat into the coding ring. Introducing Canva Code, the surprisingly useful AI coding tool for light interactivity within beautifully branded assets.
Canva Code lets you embed simple scripts and logic into your designs, making it possible to create interactive elements like calculators, quizzes, or decision trees, all without needing to flip between design tools and dev environments. It’s still early days, but the potential here is huge, especially for creators, consultants, and educators.
I used Canva Code to build an interactive pricing calculator for a fictional product consulting business. The idea was to help prospects self-qualify by selecting services like product consulting, user research and business process automation. As they made their selections, the calculator would tally up the cost and give them a clear, branded pricing summary.
After just a few minutes of chatting with Canva AI, my pricing calculator for my fictional business looked polished enough to embed in a landing page and functioned well enough to eliminate back-and-forth around rates and packages.
For product managers focused on continuous improvement and holistic product development, Canva Code is a smart step forward.
I’m beyond excited to see how this evolves.
If the future sees knowledge work converge, Canva is ready
Canva is no longer just a design tool.
While the rest of the product development world has been focused on shiny new AI-prototyping tools like Lovable and Bolt, Canva has been quietly working towards becoming a capable workplace for product development teams.
Canva CEO Melanie Perkins recently said in an interview with Wired that they use Canva “extremely extensively, for literally everything.”
She went on to describe how that included engineering documentation, meeting notes, product mock-ups, and more. It’s sounding a lot like a product management tool to me.
“Our engineers do their engineering docs in Canva, we do all-hands, I do all of my product mock-ups in it. I’ve used it for decision decks and vision decks and onboarding and hiring and recruitment—name something, we're using Canva for it very extensively.”
With features like Whiteboards for mapping out roadmaps and workflows, Sheets for visually polished planning and tracking, and now Code for lightweight interactivity, Canva is carving out a niche that blends creativity with functionality.
While it may not replace heavyweight tools like Jira or Airtable just yet, it’s clear that Canva is building toward a future where product managers, marketers, and strategists can ideate, visualize, and even prototype, all in one place.
If this is just the beginning, I’m on the edge of my seat to see what Canva does next.
As a product manager with a media background, the idea of managing both the strategy and the storytelling behind a product launch in a single, beautiful tool is just, chef’s kiss.
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