Canva on Urban Quest Mission Impossible — A Record Time and a Team Built for It

When the results came in for Urban Quest’s Mission Impossible online team building experience, the Canva Design Systems team had done something that hadn’t happened before. They’d completed the event in 57 minutes and 7 seconds — a new all-time record, placing them at the top of Urban Quest’s historical leaderboard above every group that had ever run the same experience.

Their organiser, Jason Mitsios, Product Designer on Canva’s Design Systems team, wasn’t entirely surprised.

“They’re some of the world’s best engineers. They think all day solving problems and challenges. So this to them was just a little break from that — even though they still had to do it.”

It was also Jason’s fourth Urban Quest event. He’d done it with Studio Bravo. He’d done it with Culture Amp. And now with Canva. Each time he’d come back, he’d brought a different team from a different company — and each time the experience delivered exactly what he came for.

Why Jason Keeps Coming Back

Jason’s first Urban Quest event was the in-person Melbourne CBD experience, so long ago he can’t remember exactly who organised it. He remembers enjoying it. Then lockdown hit, and he found the virtual version:

“I just remembered it being a very fun time. It’s good for people in our industry because they like to be challenged — they spend all day solving problems. So I thought, utilising that in a fun sense that didn’t feel like work — it just put two and two together.”

At Culture Amp, he brought another team. At Canva, he had 22 people in his Design Systems group — spread across Sydney, the Central Coast, New Zealand, and every state in Australia. Remote-friendly was a requirement. Challenge-based was a requirement. Genuinely team-oriented was a requirement.

“Not many remote celebrations feel very team-based. It feels quite isolated. You might all get sent a package. You might do some sort of artistic thing at home, but you’re not working with each other. The thing I was hoping to get out of it was a good collaborative, team-based, fun activity — but with competition involved where we were racing against each other.”

He extended the invite beyond his immediate team to get the numbers up — from an expected 8 or 9 to 14 participants. More people, more competition, more stakes.

“More people the better. That camaraderie you get from everyone competing against each other just adds a little more to the stakes.”

The Record

The Canva Design Systems team completed Mission Impossible in 57 minutes and 7 seconds. That time sits now at the top of Urban Quest’s all-time leaderboard for the experience.

Mission Impossible is Urban Quest’s fully online team building format — a competitive team challenge delivered entirely through participants’ screens, built around cryptic problems, visual puzzles, and logic challenges that require genuine collaborative thinking to solve. There’s no physical element, no city navigation, no AR clues to discover on location. It’s purely cognitive — high-intensity problem solving being the core concept.

Canva’s Design Systems team finished and got straight back to work.

The winning team’s own account was equally matter-of-fact:

“We just communicated really well. Whenever we were stuck, we explained exactly why. It was usually clear what everybody was focusing on. It was very natural — hard to put an exact description to it.”

What the Team Observed About Themselves

The players’ most honest and interesting observation came from comparing how they handled confusion during the event versus how they handle it at work:

“Calling out where we were stuck was super important. That actually made me realise — in our daily work days, we don’t really call out when we’re stuck as quickly as we did here. Maybe that’s something to take away.”

Another noted the absence of crosstalk — something that can derail collaborative remote sessions:

“We didn’t have a problem with talking over the top of one another at all, which I know can be really annoying on Zoom calls.”

The speed of alignment surprised even them:

“Half the time, everybody had already caught up to what someone else was doing. If one person was struggling to find something, someone immediately jumped in. That pretty much sums up the Design Systems team.”

They also discovered something about each other specifically:

“I love that we have a lot of good puzzle solvers in the team. Before even seeing the question and understanding what it was, I was mind blown half the time.”

Canva’s Design Systems team is three sub-teams working across different projects. The event brought all three together in a shared context:

“We work in different projects and different teams. Next time I meet another team, it’ll be like we have already done a very hard navigation together. It won’t be starting from scratch.”

Jason on What Makes It Worth Returning To

Four events across three companies is an unusual level of commitment to a single team building provider. Jason’s reasoning is specific:

“I know what to expect and I know that each time I’ve done it, I’ve had fun. There aren’t too many other similar things to this which I know our team would love doing. They like being challenged. They like technical stuff. They like doing stuff to do with technology and the internet — and really solving things. That’s what we do all day. If you can do that in a fun sense, you’ve found a good niche.”

His advice to anyone in his position considering Mission Impossible:

“More people the better. If they can drum up a much larger team, or extend the invite to other teams to get more people in — it makes it much more fun. That’s why we got from eight or nine people up to fourteen.”

The record time sits on the leaderboard. Jason knows where his team is. He suggested a rematch might be on the table.

Explore Urban Quest’s online team building — Mission Impossible →

Read what actually changes after a team building event →

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Jason Mitsios is a Product Designer, Design Systems at Canva. He has attended Urban Quest four times on different occasions across three organisations. The Canva Design Systems team of 14 set the all-time completion record for Mission Impossible online team building with a time of 57 minutes and 7 seconds.