Lessons from Building Pinterest

Pinterest is a visual discovery platform that allows its users to create “pin boards” where you can pin ideas, pictures and inspiration in one central location. If you can imagine what a dream board/idea board looks like, it is exactly that, but digital. I’ve been using Pinterest for a while now, whether to pin room decoration ideas, or glean inspiration for a new painting. I wanted to reach out to someone in Pinterest to learn a little bit more about how the business runs and how it has changed over time, especially with its IPO in April 2019 under the ticker symbol PINS.

I had the wonderful opportunity of having a conversation with Tram Nguyen, an early Pinterest employee and former Head of Corporate Strategy. This interview was particularly interesting to me as it’s the intersection of things I really love — a consumer facing and user-focused brand, design, art, and M&A strategy. Thank you again Tram for a wonderful chat about your experience. I reached out through a cold email and was amazed that she took the time to reply, which just demonstrates how being open and reaching out to people can really help you learn so much.

How did you join Pinterest in 2012, and hear about this opportunity?

The CEO, Ben Silbermann, and I used to work together a long time ago Google. We were on the same team and kept in touch over the years. When he finally created Pinterest, he emailed me about the product letting me know that it was a tool for planning/making ideas. I actually archived the email, but it was later when I was redecorating that I actually used the product and absolutely fell in love with it. From there, I was on board.

Building Pinterest from the ground up, you must have seen so much change, from a startup to what it is today. How would you describe that change?

When I joined we were 80 employees — I was employee number 80, in fact. Pinterest was so young that it actually didn’t have any business or advertising product. That was what I wanted to help them build. Fast forward to now and there are north of 2000 employees, it’s a global organization, with a huge advertising arm. The pace of company and user growth has been amazing to watch — growing from 80 to 2000 people in 7 years is incredible. Despite this, the culture has remained consistent — it’s a humble culture with employees who care so much for the users. Though the company has grown tremendously in size, our very core has remained the same. The experience of Pinterest is not about self-promotion and is more about self-discovery.

I noticed that you did more Marketing and Sales when your role first started, how did that change into M&A and integrating products such as JELLYHQ into Pinterest?

My original job was to help users and marketers really understand Pinterest capabilities. I also built the first Pinterest business accounts and advertising products. After a few years, I wanted to try something different and this is when the company delved into M&A. A large part of M&A that no one really discusses is the difficulty of integrating the tech and talent that you are acquiring into the company. I knew how to place people and set them up for success which is why it was a perfect fit. That role rally evolved into more strategy work: namely, macro trends: how the market is shifting, changing globally, and how to meet that demand. There are so many trends to keep track of, do you have a priority list of things to take note of? What we look at is how are consumer behavior patterns changing and evolving, and how we may evolve to be in line with this growth. What we try to take signal on is what do consumers like about the experience and how does that make sense for our brand.

How do you ask your users what they want when users cannot articulate their own pain point? What about features that don’t exist? We really look at the core problem that a user is trying to solve. For example, we’ll investigate a scenario for wedding planning, and we will walk through all the steps of making this plan and what points of friction there are for people to solve. If you asked a customer what they wanted before the car, they would have said a ‘faster horse’, so it’s more about understanding that they want faster transportation rather than the specifics of the product. We get really close to our customers and ask for every single step in their process to understand what stages we can come in to.

From my understanding, the customer segment of Pinterest is actually within the 20–45 female demographic. Do you see that demographic changing as Pinterest scales up? As we’ve seen global growth, Pinterest’s users have actually become more gender balanced. We do see a nice spectrum across use cases, and demographic — a lot of people use it for large life events like planning for trips, and for fashion ideas, or decoration ideas. There are both large event use-cases and smaller daily applications.

What was your favorite part of working for Pinterest? Least favorite part?

There are really 3 things that Pinterest really shines for me.

1. The product experience is beautiful. Before coming here, I never saw myself as a creative person, but I always could admire and appreciate beauty.

2. It is such a large opportunity to change the world and the way people think, imagine and create.

3. It is really the people that create the culture. The focus has actually been to get people offline — the app is used to encourage people to get into the world.

The only downside I would say is that the larger we get, the harder it is to make decisions quickly. I sometimes miss the times where we could make decisions rapidly because of sheer size and scale.

What did a typical day look like for you at Pinterest?

It looked something like… I’d commute to work, jump into a “stand-up” which is like a sprint or a to-do list. Then, I went to a blue sky “thinking for the future” meeting which is very different to the first meeting was like. Then, I’d have around 2 hours to catch up on reading, followed by meeting with the legal team, and then with recruiting. 60–70% of my day comprised of meetings, and 30–40% reading and industry research to synthesize my thoughts and understand the way the market is going.

My Takeaways:

• 1. Articulating a core vision through branding is essential in building a loyal community. Pinterest therefore branded itself as a “discovery engine” rather than a social media platform.
• 2. Pain points are understood by gaining an understanding of the consumer decision-use framework as compared to consumers’ interview answers (an example of this is understanding step by step how someone makes a wedding board as compared to just asking what wedding planners want)
• 3. The integration of talent/skills/platforms can be complex and hard to manage. Post-merger integration = as important as core business.

I would like to thank Tram once again for agreeing to interview with me, and personally I am really inspired by the way the Pinterest brand has stayed so consistent until now. I recently took an M&A class at Penn and found this as an exciting extension from that: learning more about how post-merger integration happens in real life. I hope you enjoyed this post, and as always, feel free to email/comment your thoughts!

Originally published at https://www.nicoleseah.net.