Give Away Your Legos

Scale yourself by delegating the work you love to enable personal and company growth

Cameron Adams
Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and embracing AI

Give Away Your Legos

"If you're trying to write every single one of those emails, you have no chance of scaling. So you need to think about who you're going to bring in to help you, what systems you're going to introduce... and that requires you to hand off that stuff." - Cameron Adams

What It Is

Give Away Your Legos is a mindset framework for personal and organizational scaling, originally articulated by Molly Graham. The core insight is that as companies grow, individuals must continuously hand off work they've built expertise in—and often deeply enjoy—to others. This isn't just about delegation for efficiency; it's about recognizing that your identity and joy in certain tasks can become a bottleneck to growth.

At Canva, this framework is a core part of their culture. Cameron Adams runs every new employee through cultural onboarding that includes this concept, because scaling from 10 to 4,500 employees requires everyone to constantly evolve beyond their current responsibilities.

How It Works

The framework addresses the natural tension between personal mastery and organizational scale:

The Scaling Problem:

  • Early in a role, you can personally handle everything
  • As the company grows, complexity multiplies exponentially (e.g., 100 million users across 190 countries in 100 languages)
  • Your personal capacity becomes the constraint

The Identity Trap:

  • You build self-identity around the work you do well
  • You derive joy from doing that work
  • Letting go feels like losing part of yourself

The Growth Opportunity:

  • Handing off work creates space for new, higher-leverage activities
  • Building teams, passing on experience, and helping others excel can be equally fulfilling
  • Your impact multiplies through others

How to Apply It

  1. Recognize the moment - When you're working harder but falling behind, it's time to give away some Legos

  2. Identify what to hand off - Look for tasks where:

    • You've built strong expertise
    • Others could learn to do them
    • Your time could create more impact elsewhere

  3. Find the right people - Bring in others who can grow into the role, not just execute the task

  4. Build systems - Create processes and documentation so the work can scale beyond any individual

  5. Find new joy - Shift your identity toward building teams, mentoring, and enabling others

  6. Stay connected to the work - You don't have to completely disconnect; you can stay involved strategically while others handle execution

When to Use It

Use this framework when:

  • Scaling rapidly - Your company is growing faster than you can personally keep up
  • Feeling stretched - You're working harder but impact isn't increasing proportionally
  • Team is ready - You have people who could take on more responsibility
  • Blocking others - Your involvement in certain areas is preventing others from growing
  • Plateauing - You want to reach the next level of impact but current work fills all your time

Example: Email at Canva

Cameron Adams uses email copywriting as an example:

"If you're the first email copywriter at Canva, you can get away from writing all the emails for the first year maybe, but when you're writing emails for 100 million people in 190 different countries, in 100 different languages, all at different stages of their journey through using Canva from beginners to intermediates to experts, that just massively multiplies the complexity of the job."

To scale, that person needed to:

  1. Stop writing every email personally
  2. Bring in team members to help
  3. Build translation and localization systems
  4. Create processes for beginner/intermediate/expert journeys
  5. Find joy in team building and enabling great work

Source

  • Guest: Cameron Adams
  • Episode: "Inside Canva: Coaches not managers, giving away your Legos, and embracing AI"
  • Key Discussion: (00:16:31 - 00:21:44) - Cam explains how Canva uses Give Away Your Legos as a core cultural element
  • YouTube: Watch on YouTube
  • Original Source: Molly Graham, First Round Review article

Related Frameworks

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