Jennie Rogerson learned Canva’s leadership before heading up HR

When Canva’s CEO and COO approached Jennie Rogerson to ask if she wanted to move into the chief people officer role after serving as leadership operations lead, she hesitated.

“I said something along the lines of, ‘I really don’t think that’s a great idea,’” Rogerson recalled. In the leadership operations job, which was similar to a chief of staff role, Rogerson oversaw a variety of projects to help the leadership team accomplish its goals. When Canva’s head of people departed the company, Rogerson was tasked with overseeing the people team while they recruited a new person for that role.

But Rogerson, who joined Canva in 2019, didn’t have previous HR experience. In a phone call with co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht, she suggested Canva look at more seasoned professionals for the role.

Obrecht countered that Canva could hire those professionals to its people operations leadership bench, and made the case for Rogerson to take over as chief people officer because she knew the ins and outs of the business so well.

In November 2021, Rogerson officially took over as Canva’s chief people officer.

From leadership ops to people ops. When Rogerson first joined in the leadership operations role in 2019, much of her work was focused on “running the operational cadences and rhythms around the leadership team to help us deliver our goals.”

She sat in on the engineering leads’ meeting, for example, to make sure the founders’ visions were coming through in the way those employees worked. When Canva didn’t have a customer support lead, she stepped in and simultaneously recruited and hired someone to fill the role full-time.

A big part of Rogerson’s job was taking on projects that “didn’t really have a home but needed someone to run them,” such as the founders’ charitable foundation.

When she moved into the chief people officer role, Rogerson started looking at Canva’s business from a different perspective. Whereas she looked at the business from “a bird’s eye view” in the leadership operations role, the chief people officer role prompted her to look “underneath the organization.” This meant making sure Canva employees understood the founders’ visions, and that they felt empowered to grow in their roles and achieve the company’s goals.

Transitioning into the chief people officer job was a “learning curve,” given Rogerson hadn’t been on a people team before, she said. She gained an appreciation for “the depth of care” the people team put into “individual cases of people really struggling.”

“All the breadth of just how much a people team does was a really important learning journey,” Rogerson said.

While working closely with Canva’s co-founders, Obrecht and Melanie Perkins, she became deeply familiar with their vision of what the people experience should be at the company. She said one pillar of that vision was consistency. Whether an employee is going through recruitment, the first performance cycle, or going out on parental leave, “all of that should feel incredibly consistent, and your values should play a really deep part throughout that entire journey.”

That guiding principle helped inform much of Rogerson’s work over the next five years, which involved launching a new employee benefits stipend, elevating Canva as a “force for good” through charitable work, and organizing a new conference series, Canva Create.

The chief of staff to chief people officer pipeline. Rogerson is part of a handful of former chiefs of staff who have moved into the chief people officer role.

UnitedHealth’s Erin McSweeney followed a similar path, having served as EVP and chief of staff to the healthcare company’s CEO before being appointed as chief people officer in 2022. And the startup Synthesia, an AI video company, counts Laura Gonzalez Florez as both chief of staff and head of people. (In a recent interview with HR Brew, Florez said one of the central requirements of the chief of staff role is to “build deep relationships and know people, so that obviously is very transferable to a chief people officer role.”)

Rogerson, who’s built up a network of people in both of these roles over the years, observed that both “are really shaped around, what does the business need to achieve their goals.” For that reason, no one chief people officer or chief of staff role is the same, nor does the job stay the same.

“I molded myself around what Canva needed in 2021. What it needed in 2021 is very different to what it looks like in 2026,” she said.