Interview with Trish Gray, Head of Business Growth at Pinterest

Managers Club, Interviews and Resources for Engineering Managers

Vidal: Today I have with me Trish Gray. Welcome, Trish, to Manager’s Club.
Trish: Thanks, Vidal. It’s great to be here.
Vidal: Thanks. It’s great to have you. Trish, maybe we could start out a little bit … maybe you could tell people a little bit about your current role and what you do.
Trish: Yeah. Currently, I’m the head of business growth at Pinterest. Growth is a discipline that is emerging quite powerfully in the Bay Area regarding being the glue between engineering, product, marketing and business objectives. We’re in the business of creating those prototypes and really testing with an extreme data-driven approach utilizing a lot of user research, a lot of opportunity sizing, and other methods and disciplines in order to make sure that we’re maximizing all of engineering’s time and making sure that we’re creating features that we know have product markets that we know that are great for our users.
What’s your background and how did you get into management?
Vidal: All right. Awesome. Yeah, growth is super important. Trish, I was looking through your background on LinkedIn and you’ve had a long career in engineering leadership. You were Director of Software Engineering, VP of Engineering, Head of Business Growth, a bunch… Maybe you could speak a little bit about your background and how did you get into management? How did you transition in?
Trish: Yes. Yeah. I’ve done a little bit of everything. I started my career in computer science. I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for computer science. And while I was there decided to start a company for online education. At the time, I was just a coder. I’d been coding since I was 12. I loved coding. That was my thing. I had really no interest necessarily in being an entrepreneur, but that’s how it happened because we wanted to create the best learning system on the web in information technology.
Trish: We built what you could now call an online bootcamp a CodingDojo or a Hackbright Academy online but we were about 10 years ahead of our time. Worked on it for many, many years, made it into a school, had a lot of customer support. I created an online IDE system for learning. Also created a similar system for instruction and for creating instructional materials.
Trish: So that was my role. I was the coder, the technologist of the entire thing and how I got into management was simply by necessity. We were growing the business and I had to run multiple aspects of the business, and so I couldn’t be the only one coding anymore. Brought in a few folks, we were a very close-knit family so we learned it all together and that just grew from there.
Trish: So I don’t have a traditional trajectory into management but I will say that once we sold our company to O’Reilly Media, I had a mentor in the form of a director of HR that really taught me a lot about organizational development, performance management, and really just more of how complex management is and how it’s a completely different set of skills.
Trish: And I found myself really geeking out on it and very much enjoying it and realizing that if you really build management skills and you try to be the most effective manager possible, then not only does your business improve but you end up having this wonderfully healthy organization that is right there with you, mission-driven and excited to be working on the same things.
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