Canva Schedule
Canva is a graphics design platform used to create graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content. A sizeable part of the user base utilised Canva to design content for posting onto social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, for marketing and continual customer engagement.
User feedback surfaced a desire to schedule posts ahead of time, so that content could be created in advance and delivered without user intervention. This could align with a product launch or cross-platform announcements.
Additionally, it enabled posts to be delivered in time slots optimised for the target platforms. For example, the best time to post on Facebook is Wednesday, 11 a.m. and 1–2 p.m. whereas the best time for LinkedIn is Wednesday and Friday at 9 a.m (Source: Track Maven). The optimal time slots are further refined depending on the industry.
Canva approached our company, Helix, to implement the frontend for the product. It would be integrated with Canva's design tools to ensure a seamless transition between content creation and post scheduling.
We formed a cross-company and cross-functional team of frontend engineers, backend engineers, designers, and project managers to execute the project. I played a project management role in addition to my engineering responsibilities, working closely with the project manager in Canva to ensure that the project tracked to budget and timelines.
There was considerable co-ordination between the tasks and output from the different teams to ensure dependencies were met in the correct order and risks were mitigated. We used Team Gantt to define dependencies and the overall project schedule, and Clubhouse for story and task management.
The end product featured beautiful colours and animations, drag and drop calendar functionality, and integration with key social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn).