Building Growth through Resilience: Jessica Chiew

Jessica Chiew is global head of GTM strategy and operations at Canva. She is set to speak at Revenue Brew’s upcoming event, Building Growth through Resilience, on February 24. Ahead of the event, we caught up with her over email to discuss resilience, cross-functional alignment, and how technology impacts how her team goes to market.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What does resilience in a revenue organization look like?

Resilience is about holding clarity and adaptability at the same time. Canva’s enterprise business is growing incredibly quickly, which makes it an exciting environment, but also one where change is constant. The teams that hold up best are those with strong grounding. For us, that grounding comes from a deep commitment to our customers, our values as a revenue organization, and a predictable cadence for how we run the business.

I invest a lot in showing up as a real person and taking the time to help my teams understand why I’m here and why I care. I grew up in a more formal consulting environment, so this is something I had to learn. But I see it as a critical foundation, especially when leading through change, asking people to address gaps in the business, or moving in new directions.

How do you encourage alignment across sales, marketing, and customer teams during periods of change?

Alignment gets much easier when teams are anchored to the same values, which for us include always putting our customers first and using data and signals to guide action. Through this, we spend less time debating ownership and more time asking, “What is the customer telling us through their behavior?”

When marketing, sales, and [customer success] are all anchored to the same signals—and can interpret them the same way—alignment becomes a byproduct rather than a constant negotiation.

What role is technology playing in supporting your team today?

Technology is central to how we go to market at Canva. It not only helps us support a broad and diverse customer base at scale, but it’s also what ensures that every single person at Canva serving our customers is doing so in the most impactful way possible.

We’ve heavily invested in tools that reduce friction and surface signals to make us the best we can be and add the most value.

I evaluate tools based on whether they help teams see what matters more clearly or eliminate low value manual work. If a tool improves decision-making, speeds up understanding, or creates shared visibility, it earns its place.

There’s a ton of innovation in the SaaS and AI market, but even if three tools can do account research, we need to be prescriptive about where that happens. If it adds complexity without clarity, it’s noise—and we’re intentional about cutting noise.

What’s one metric you used to trust that you now treat with more skepticism?

Top-line growth and overall [net dollar retention]). They’re important, but overrelying on them is a trap. They’re lagging indicators, and they don't give you enough signal on the underlying trends in your business.

As an operator, I’ve learned that these are outputs of your work, not levers you can pull. So we invest heavily in breaking down the customer journey and identifying the metrics that measure our effectiveness at every stage. That’s what lets you look ahead: spotting trends up funnel that will hit revenue a few months later, or catching signals down funnel around adoption and expansion that tell you whether your install base is healthy before it shows up in a renewal number.

What’s one best practice that has helped your team stay focused as priorities shift?

Predictable cadences and rituals. We spend a lot of time designing and evolving the rhythm of how we run the business: what we review, when, and at what altitude. When you have that operating rhythm locked in, shifting priorities becomes a lot less disorienting. The team always knows when we’ll be looking at a given part of the business, so new priorities get absorbed into the system rather than blowing it up. It turns “everything is changing” into “we’re reprioritizing within a structure we trust.”