Went through the full Canva loop for a senior PM role earlier this year and the behavioral component was notably more thorough than most companies I've interviewed at. Posting this because I couldn't find a good breakdown before my interview.
Canva has published values ("Be a force for good", "Make complex things simple", "Empower others to design", etc.) but the questions in the interview don't map obviously to these. The behavioral round felt less like a values checklist and more like the interviewer trying to understand how you actually make decisions.
Questions I got: Tell me about a time you had to kill a project or feature you'd championed. What drove the decision and how did you handle the team reaction. Describe a situation where you had to influence without authority. What did you do when someone didn't come on board? Give me an example of a product decision you made with incomplete data. How did you decide when you had enough to move? Tell me about a time you had to balance user needs against business constraints. Where did you land and how do you feel about that now?
That last one caught me off guard. The "how do you feel about that now" follow-up is interesting. They want to hear some self-reflection, not just that you executed the business call cleanly.
What they seemed to weight. Genuine stories over polished stories. I stumbled through one answer and it ended up being a better conversation than my most rehearsed response. They pushed hard on specifics: actual user numbers, actual timeline, actual outcome.
Format. Mine was 30 minutes with the hiring manager and 30 minutes with a cross-functional stakeholder. Two distinct styles. The HM was structured. The XFN partner went wherever the conversation went.
For non-PM roles. A few SWE friends who went through Canva said the behavioral questions in their loops had similar themes: making hard tradeoffs, influencing without direct authority, operating in ambiguity. Makes sense for a company still growing fast.