Leveraging Design Culture for Growth: A Case Study on Pinterest
Technology Category
- Drones - VTOL & VTOL Hybrid Drones
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud
Applicable Industries
- Buildings
- Electrical Grids
Applicable Functions
- Maintenance
- Product Research & Development
Services
- Training
About The Customer
Pinterest is a social networking software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. With a team of 2,200 employees, the company is known for its strong design culture that emphasizes humility and a focus on the user and the product. Pinterest believes in working cross-functionally when creating new features or products and showing work before it’s done. The company is committed to creating a culture that celebrates design and nurtures design talent, and it has grown rapidly while maintaining a reputation as a great place for designers to thrive.
The Challenge
Pinterest, a social networking software company based in San Francisco, has a strong design culture that emphasizes humility and a focus on the user and the product. The company believes in working cross-functionally when creating new features or products and showing work before it’s done. However, maintaining this design-driven culture while growing rapidly and retaining employees posed a challenge. The company also faced the challenge of operationalizing processes within hybrid organizational structures, which can get complex. Furthermore, Pinterest needed to ensure that there was a connection to the needs of the customer in every project.
The Solution
To address these challenges, Pinterest adopted a hybrid approach to organizational design, blending multiple organizational models and running different models in parallel. This approach provided the flexibility to tailor the organizational structure and meet the immediate needs of the organization. Designers were positioned in temporary cross-functional teams to work on focused projects with clear deadlines, after which they returned to the centralized design team. Pinterest also created the role of Creative Director as an alternate, non-managerial option for career advancement. The company used InVision for socializing designs with other teams, user research, and creating prototypes to quickly validate concepts. Additionally, Pinterest conducted IDEO-style workshops to test new ideas or move teams forward when they were stuck on challenging problems.
Operational Impact
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