5 lessons behind explosive product growth

As Pinterest grew from 5 employees to a team of 650, I learned 5 core lessons. If your company is going through a phase of rapid growth, there will inevitably be many gains, but also many mistakes. The best companies, like Pinterest, learn from their mistakes and adjust quickly to achieve continued growth.

As Pinterest’s first product manager and later as the leader of the product development team, I have led overseas search, promotion , visual search and other businesses. This article is a summary of my learning and working experience at Pinterest.

1. What to measure is important

It is often said that there is no progress without careful measurement. This statement is certainly correct, but it ignores the core strategy of selecting key metrics. If your key metrics are set incorrectly, you are likely wasting your time.

In the early days of Pinterest's growth, the core metric our growth team set was monthly active users. Monthly Active Users (MAU) is a common indicator for many social products, and it is a taken-for-granted approach to use it as our growth indicator.

The growth team then created and advanced a product roadmap that drove a large number of new users to the top of the signup funnel. Our monthly active users (MAU) were indeed increasing, but we also had problems with our user conversion funnel. The growth team spent a lot of time acquiring new users, and the product team focused on increasing the activity of existing users; however, no one was responsible for the onboarding process and retention of these new users so that they could also become active users. The result is: the loss of new users is very serious.

After realizing the problem, the team adjusted the core measurement indicator from monthly active users (MAU) to new weekly active users (NWAU). Let me explain here that Pinteret's standard for defining active users is that users post new content on the website. After this, the growth team no longer focused on acquiring new registered users, but instead provided onboarding guidance services to new registered users.

This change in measurement allowed the growth team to better match products and users, and the number of weekly active users (WAU) continued to grow rapidly. That is to say, we not only need to get users to register, but also ensure that they have a good experience from registration, browsing to posting content, so that users can get long-term value on Pinterest.

This story fully illustrates the danger of vanity indicators, which not only mislead the team's direction, but also are likely to become a vicious cycle. Once you realize that there is a problem with the indicator, you must make changes immediately.

2. A scientific organizational structure is important

Most execution problems come down to two reasons: improper organizational structure or the wrong people. People often talk about "mishiring", but few people pay attention to organizational structure issues. In fact, many young companies are committed to "flattening" their organizations, reducing organizational layers, or allowing the organization to take shape naturally. However, this approach often results in very mediocre execution.

Here are two examples:

In the early days of Pinterest, our organization was matrixed, which meant that no single team had all the resources needed to launch a product. The product development team I am in is mostly supported by backend engineers. When we wanted to release a new feature, I had to ask the mobile team to prioritize my needs and let the next available front-end engineer confirm my schedule. So that when the front-end engineers are available, our back-end engineers and designers are also ready; when I was very desperate, I even made a Gantt chart to sort out the entire project process!

This approach makes it difficult to launch excellent products quickly.

When we switched to a full-stack team, everything moved much faster. We can determine our schedule according to product priority and launch better products; at the same time, everyone on the team will work more easily.

As a second example, there was a period of time when the growth team reported to the marketing team, which resulted in a lot of time being spent on communication and coordination. People on the growth team are constantly meeting with the product team to make sure their strategies and product roadmaps are aligned. We spent a lot of time in meetings, but it was still very difficult to identify priorities.

We then streamlined our strategy and had the growth team report to the product team, which better aligned everyone’s work with the product roadmap and eliminated a lot of unnecessary meetings.

Changing organizational structure is often very painful and distracts from core work; however, it is absolutely necessary when a company moves to the next stage of development. When the organizational structure fails to adapt to your execution strategy, it can become an additional obstacle to your company's growth.

3. Sometimes you have to be brave enough to ignore the loudest users

When some users are dissatisfied with a feature you launch, they will complain; when some users have needs, they will even initiate requests on Facebook: we call these users "the loudest users." These users can be both a validation and a curse for the product. Because without them, you wouldn’t have your company; but, to get the next million users, sometimes you need to ignore their opinions.

“The loudest users” do not represent all users, and definitely do not represent future users. They are your highly active users and the users who understand your product best at this stage.

But this will produce two illusions or illusions:

• They are used to the current products, so they don't want product iterations or updates.
• They will inevitably ask you to add new features, which will increase the complexity of the product.

These two illusions may lead you in the wrong direction and cause heavy losses. Good companies understand that in order to achieve greater development, they must make a choice between the two. Below I will use two examples of Facebook and Pinterest to illustrate this.

Myth 1: Users don’t want to change their habits

When Facebook first launched its News Channel in 2006, it caused a huge backlash among users. Many angry users threatened to boycott Facebook and even created Facebook groups to collectively protest the feature. But over time, the product became a core feature of Facebook.

If Facebook had let a vocal minority of users decide what features were best, Facebook might not be what it is today. Ultimately, Facebook was proven right; they ignored the minority opposition and stuck to their strategy.

It takes courage to make these changes! You don't want to stimulate existing loyal users, but you need to get the next million users, and the scary thing is that they don't know what they need. The key here is what the data tells you. We need to actively communicate with users. If the data tells you that the new direction is correct, then ignore the minority of users who speak out. Because most of the time, these vocal few are just the tip of the iceberg.

Illusion 2: Launching complex product features

If you were to roll out every feature that your existing users asked for, you’d end up with a highly engaged but very narrow user base.

Deep users will demand increased product complexity, but this may be detrimental to the retention of new users. I've found that sometimes the extra complexity is worth it, but most of the time it's not. Whenever you launch a feature that’s most requested by existing users, it’s always used by <5% of users; so you need to think about whether you really need to change the rules of the game for those <5% of users.

Remember: it's easier to add features than to take them away! Another problem is that the features users request are often solutions to small convenience issues rather than real solutions.

When I was at Pinterest, one of the most requested features was the ability to arrange boards the way you wanted. You can imagine a user scenario: they need to scroll down to the bottom of the artboards to find their favorite artboard. Rearrangement is indeed a pain point, but it is definitely not the best solution; this feature is only used by a very small number of deep users. When you dig deeper into this demand, you will find that the fundamental pain point is that it is difficult to find the required artboard.

Product managers should not just optimize functions according to user requirements, but should provide correct and scalable solutions to solve the pain points of most users. In this case, we developed the "Personal Search" feature; because more users use search to solve the problem of finding something, rather than rearranging their boards.

Finally, don't forget about the resources your optimization functionality consumes. Especially when you’re a startup with less resources, you need to better balance the pros and cons; either increase engagement with existing users or drive growth with new users.

Not only do you need to acquire a large number of new users like a growth hacker , but you also need to make the product onboarding process simpler, provide more use cases, and increase the conversion rate from new users to retained users. Once a product reaches a certain stage and builds enough stickiness, you have to think about how to acquire the next 100 million users, even if this makes existing users uncomfortable.

4. Maintaining user trust in banks: Avoiding spending more than you earn

User trust is like a bank. Everyone hopes that the money they deposit in the bank is more than what they withdraw. I’ve heard of a product theory before that it takes five positive experiences to make up for one negative experience. It can be seen that the exchange rate for this conversion is very expensive in the bank that the user trusts.

This mindset makes me more careful about the user experience, which I think is why Pinterest has become one of the best consumer brands in the United States in a short period of time. (Note: Prophet recently ranked Pinterest as one of the top 10 brands in the U.S., ahead of Nike and Apple)

We have deposited a large amount of money in the bank that users trust by using good product experience, but this is not the only way to deposit money. We also gain user trust by providing backups, a customer service team to handle basic issues, and timely reminders of product updates. When you have enough deposits in a bank that users trust, users will give you a certain degree of tolerance. Whether you make a small mistake or when you try something new.

In Pinterest's early days as it rapidly expanded, the site would sometimes crash. Engineers worked hard to restore the website quickly and provide file backups to users in a timely manner. Everyone on our marketing team was updating Facebook and Twitter on the progress of the Pinterest process and working hard to get back every user. Users will be very grateful for our efforts and further enhance their trust in our products.

5. Face difficulties head-on and move forward

Every company has moments when growth stagnates and morale dips. Even Facebook has its moments of stagnation.

Until the summer of 2012, Facebook was our primary distribution channel for Pinterest. But the good times didn’t last long, Facebook acquired Instagram; because of competition, Facebook shut down our publishing interface on it.

Slowing growth is scary for any company, but it’s also the perfect time for self-doubt and self-reflection. Have we reached a growth plateau? Should we be more like Instagram? Ultimately, we stuck to our positioning, the growth team stuck to the original development path, developed a new distribution strategy, and finally Pinterest's growth accelerated again.

When an organization begins to doubt itself, leadership must stick to its principles. Remember that there are always days, months, and even quarters like this, even the almighty Facebook has experienced them. As long as you focus on your core strategy and it’s the right strategy, you can break through the difficulties by executing it.