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Zoe Nakamura
I grew up between Sydney and Osaka (my mum is Japanese, my dad is Australian) and that bicultural upbringing turned out to be the most useful qualification for my career. I studied computer science at the University of Melbourne and then joined Atlassian in 2017 as a graduate engineer. Atlassian had a reputation as a place where engineers could move into product, and I made that transition after two years, joining the Trello mobile team as a product manager.
Trello mobile was my introduction to the economics of freemium products. We had 50 million users and a conversion rate that I can't share but that was… let's say "aspirational." My job was to move that number. Over 18 months, I ran 40+ experiments on the mobile onboarding flow, the paywall presentation, the feature gating logic, and the upgrade nudge timing. The single most impactful change was moving the first paywall touchpoint from day 1 to day 7, after users had created at least three boards and invited at least one collaborator. Conversion to paid nearly doubled. The insight: don't ask people to pay until they've experienced enough value that paying feels like protecting an investment, not making a bet.
In 2021, I moved to Canva as a growth product manager, focused on mobile. Canva's mobile growth story is remarkable and underreported. Most people think of Canva as a desktop design tool, but mobile represents 60% of their MAUs and the mobile user journey is completely different: more spontaneous, more template-driven, more social. I led the team that built the mobile-first sharing flow that turned Canva designs into social content. We optimized for "time to first share" and got it under 3 minutes for new users. That one metric drove more organic growth than any paid campaign.
The APAC context matters here. In Southeast Asia, India, and parts of East Asia, mobile isn't a secondary screen; it's the only screen. Internet access is mobile-first, payment is mobile-first, social is mobile-first. The growth playbooks written for US markets, where most users discover products on desktop and "also have a mobile app," don't apply. I spent two years at Canva building growth strategies for markets where the entire user journey happens on a phone with limited storage, intermittent connectivity, and a screen that's 6 inches wide.
I left Canva in 2024 to write about mobile-first growth with an APAC lens. The region has 2.5 billion internet users and some of the most innovative mobile products in the world (Grab, Gojek, Line, KakaoTalk) but almost all growth content is written from a US/Europe perspective.
I live in Bondi Beach, Sydney. I surf before work (badly but consistently), I'm learning Japanese calligraphy from my grandmother, and I believe that the next $100B consumer company will be mobile-first and not American.
Experience
- Growth PM, Canva (Mobile)
- Product Manager, Atlassian (Trello Mobile)
- BS Computer Science, University of Melbourne