In Conversation with Jamieson Kerns, VP, Engineering

A year into his tenure at Pinterest, Jamieson Kerns, VP, Engineering, joins Life at Pinterest to share more about his role leading our Programmatic Engineering and Product teams. Jamie discusses his vision for the team, collaboration with partners, being passionate about your work and what he’s most looking forward to as he enters his second year at the company. 

A lot has changed since we last connected, and your role has evolved over the past year. How would you describe your expanded scope and the workstreams you’re leading? 

It has been a really fun year, and since we last connected, I’ve shifted from acting as an individual contributor to managing our engineering and product teams in programmatic. I’ve also taken on an interim role leading our ads quality teams focused on ads ranking and modeling. I’m particularly energized about our recent acquisition of tvScientific and how we are building a better together story across the two businesses.

When you first joined, you talked about being energized by the passion and hustle of the team. Now that you're a year in and leading a broader organization, how has that first impression held up and what has surprised you most?

That continues to be one of the best parts of the job: the people I work with on a daily basis are wonderful. They’re hardworking, they’re smart, and they believe in the mission of what we’re building.

I love the scrappiness of the team, and the novelty of the work being done here. Many of the investments the teams are making are industry-leading. I’ve talked to leaders (at much larger companies!) that are trying to model their own approach from papers this team has written about using our data at scale to drive outcomes. The quality of talent at Pinterest and ingenuity of the team continues to impress. I feel like I’m learning from the team every day.

Programmatic advertising is a space that sits at the intersection of engineering complexity and real business impact. How would you describe the mission and vision of your team?

Our team's core mission is to seamlessly integrate Pinterest into the broader advertising ecosystem, maximizing the value of our unique signal and taste graph, both on and off the platform.

Successfully executing this vision yields multiple benefits: a more relevant ad experience for our users, reduced friction and improved performance for our advertisers. The team has proven they’re up for the challenge, building and delivering key infrastructure, improving relevancy, and developing innovative ad formats. 

Leading both the engineering and product sides of an organization requires a really integrated approach. How do you foster a culture of collaboration and alignment across your teams? 

Our engineering and product teams work very closely, and we strive to keep very open lines of communication. I’m a firm believer in fostering an empowered team. I want the teams to understand the broader context of their work. I strive to be as transparent as possible, and I want my teams to be as well. This helps everyone make better decisions and operate more quickly and confidently. Ideally, the teams understand what they’re working on and we churn less, so more time can be spent getting things done.

We also focus a lot on clear owners for individual tasks and follow ups to make sure there’s accountability. Often that extends beyond just engineering and product, and I expect my teams to work truly cross-functionally with sales, operations, product marketing, business development, etc. The fully integrated and focused nature of the team also helps to drive clarity since we operate as one org rather than a set of disparate functions.

What are the attributes of a successful member of your team? Are there any skills you encourage candidates to invest in to thrive at Pinterest? 

An internal locus of control is the number one thing I want to see from people on my teams. I want my team members to understand their role in shaping the world around them and pushing forward on what they control to make progress. I want people who seek accountability. When people feel empowered at Pinterest, the company and this team is set up extremely well for them to thrive and deliver outsized results and impact on the company.

I also really want people on the team who are passionate, and bring that passion to work every day. It’s so much more fun to work with people who really believe in what they are doing.

Looking ahead, what's the opportunity that gets you most excited about where Programmatic at Pinterest is headed over the next year or two?

I am incredibly excited about our future with tvScientific and have strong conviction about what we’re building. I believe there is so much opportunity ahead for providing more value to our advertisers.

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