Thoughts on user growth and product

Hi Jon, I was a PM on Growth at Pinterest many, many moons ago (~2013-2014?) so it was cool to see your post and read through your observations on Growth at Pinterest. A couple points I might add that might be of interest to your readers would be that the biggest changes can be technically driven, and the biggest changes are sometimes the smallest. I was at Pinterest from 2013 - 2017 and iirc the two biggest experiments in terms of percentage user signups and retention were the conversion of unauth pages to react [1] and the change from "Pin" to "Save". They were both roughly equal magnitude in impact (again, iirc), and completely outsized all other growth experiments shipped in those respective years. Two very different projects, approached from very different angles, that ultimately lead to a faster, and more understandable, product.

[1] https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/driving-user-growth...

Some wise advice here. I relate to the thought on cyclical user growth.

Some execs refuse to hear that Q3 is regularly going to be a dead space no matter how aggressive the company gets, for example. It's a challenging work environment when there's no room for a down month or a holiday-season slump.

For me, the real growth question with Pinterest is how come they rank so well on Google? They dominate result for many image-related queries despite being a content aggregator. Everything on Pinterest inherently lives someplace else on the web, no? How come those aren’t what I’m seeing? The site seems to have become an SEO powerhouse despite - at least for me - never being the result I want.