🎨 Takeoff #45: Pinterest's growth lessons
Welcome to Takeoff, your weekly dose of product deep-dives and new learning opportunities. Today, we're diving into Pinterest and its growth. Lessgo!
💪 Product Management insights from Pinterest
Quick Trivia question: You might be aware that Google’s former name was Backrub. Would you like to guess what Pinterest’s former name was?
If you answered Tote, then 10 points to Gryffindor!
In this week’s edition of the newsletter, we are going to dive deep into Pinterest and what product managers can take away from their growth story.
Pinterest (formerly Tote) started as a mobile shopping app that allowed users to save items they wanted to buy. However, the founders, Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, noticed that users were more interested in collecting items than purchasing them. This observation led to a pivot. The team decided to focus on the act of collecting and sharing items online, and thus, Pinterest was born.
The year 2009 marked a pivotal moment for Pinterest. The founders identified a fundamental human behaviour they could leverage: the innate desire to collect and share things that inspire us. They decided to transform their platform to cater to this need. The concept was straightforward yet powerful: users could "pin" images they stumbled upon online to virtual "boards", thereby creating curated collections of visual bookmarks.
Takeaway 💫 - Pay close attention to user behaviour and be data-driven while making pivots.
The first post on Pinterest by one of its co-founders.
The Inflection Point
The inflection point for Pinterest came when they decided to focus on a specific demographic: women who were into crafting and DIY projects. They targeted this group by organising meetups at local boutiques and handing out Pinterest invites which were exclusive at that time. This strategy worked wonders. The users they acquired were not just active; they were passionate and eager to share Pinterest with their communities. This led to a surge in word-of-mouth referrals, propelling Pinterest's growth.
Takeaway 💫 - Know your active users and build growth loops for them to engineer word of mouth.
Measure the metric that matters.
Pinterest established a dedicated growth team with a mission to boost their Monthly Active Users (MAU). However, they soon realised they were facing a 'leaky bucket' problem, with users leaving as quickly as they were acquired. In response, the team pivoted their focus to Weekly Active Pins, a metric that better reflected user engagement and retention.
Takeaway 💫 - Know what to measure, not all metrics are created equally.
Users’ experience over metrics.
Egan, who formerly headed Growth at Pinterest, firmly believes that prioritising users over metrics will yield dividends in the long run. For instance, when the growth team overhauled the designs across all their emails, they decided to modify their 'Send A Pin' email. The change involved including the Pin someone sent you directly in the email, instead of requiring you to click on the email to see the Pin. Although this change resulted in a drop in metrics, they decided to implement the change anyway, as they believed it significantly improved the user experience.
Takeaway 💫 - Optimise for a smooth and friendly user experience rather than optimising for metrics.
Personalized user experience trumps generic flows.
The first step in enhancing the signup experience for users outside the U.S. involved understanding what these users sought when they visited Pinterest. Conceptually, Pinterest organises interests and ideas into what they refer to as topics. When a user signs up, they are asked to identify their interests from a set of topics, which Pinterest then uses to create a personalised home feed. Previously, international users were selected from the same set of topics as U.S. users. However, recognising that interests vary globally, Pinterest aimed to personalise this experience.
Pinterest took a strategic approach to enhance user relevance. They identified local interests and matched them with the country data derived from the user's browser. This allowed them to tailor topic suggestions for new users across the globe. This localisation experiment paid off. Depending on the country and demographic, Pinterest saw an increase in their overseas activation rate by 5-10%.
Takeaway 💫 - Use data to personalise the user experience. When building a product for a global audience, remember that it's never a 'one size fits all' solution.
🎁Bonus Resource from Pinterest’s growth team.
At Pinterest, the growth team was running 70-80 experiments in any given quarter. They had a 100-people-strong growth team. At Pinterest, they devised something called the Experience Idea Review process to gather ideas from the growth team.
You can get the template here
🎙️User Research for product managers
Episode 3, part 2 of 🎙️The Airtribe Podcast with Prasun Jain, Sr. Director of Product at Razorpay is out now! Prasun and Navneet continue their chat and deep dive into product success and user research.
Watch the full episode here
💁♂️ Product Jargon of the Week
5 Why Frameworks
The "5 Whys" is a problem-solving technique that involves asking "Why?" five times to identify the root cause of a problem. This method helps move past symptoms and towards a deeper understanding of the issues at hand.
In product management, it can be implemented in the following way:
Identify a Problem: Start with a clear statement of the problem. For example, "Users are not completing the sign-up process."
Ask Why: Ask why the problem is occurring. For example, "Why are users not completing the sign-up process?"
Find an Answer: Based on data or observation, find an answer. For example, "The sign-up process is too long."
Repeat the Process: Continue asking why until you reach the root cause. For example, "Why is the sign-up process too long?" The answer might be, "Because we're asking for unnecessary information."
Implement Solutions: Once the root cause is identified, develop and implement solutions that address this cause, not just the symptoms. In this case, it might involve simplifying the sign-up process by removing unnecessary steps.
By using the "5 Whys" technique, product managers can ensure they're solving the right problems, leading to more effective solutions and better products.
😎 Ace RCA questions with Malay
Are you interviewing for a product role? Yes? Then don’t miss this one!
Join Malay Krishna, PM expert, and us for a free comprehensive masterclass on acing RCA questions in PM interviews. Malay will share his tips and tricks, as well as, what he looks for when he interviews candidates for RCA.
Register for free here
😁 Popular Opinion
That’s all for today, folks! We hope you enjoyed this refreshed version of our newsletter. 🤗
Until next week, keep learning and growing! 👋