How Pinterest scaled to build the worlds catalog of 75+ billion ideas

Over the course of just six years, Pinterest has helped over 100 million pinners discover and collect over 75+ billion ideas to plan their everyday lives. Romit Jadhwani walks you through the different phases of this hypergrowth journey and explores the focuses, thought processes, and decisions of Pinterests data team as they scaled and enabled this growth.

When a company goes through a hypergrowth phase, things move faster than you can control or even sometimes comprehend. This pushes teams to take shortcuts to facilitate faster data-driven decisions. If not prudently managed, this can result in a high “data debt,” which inhibits future growth opportunities. During Pinterest’s hypergrowth journey over the past six years, the data team made conscious decisions about technology, infrastructure, and processes to ensure that the data infrastructure scaled with the user growth, teams had the right tools to derive insights from the data, decision-making velocity was not impacted, and data debt was kept under control. Romit Jadhwani deep dives into the different phases of Pinterest’s journey, focusing on questions asked, analytics and data solutions designed, and value added during each phase, offering a high-level blueprint for data teams to consider for their own hypergrowth journeys.