"Silbermann helmed the process, bringing his kids by the office on the weekends while he checked in on the team as they raced to transform Pinterest into a sleeker, faster service. He passed up the McDonald’s hash browns that the engineers ordered"<p>"Which is why Silbermann has been coming in on the weekend. The changes the company is about to unleash will determine whether Pinterest can earn its deca-corn valuation"<p>"And in one central location, a product manager named Adam Barton, who had been tasked with running the code and design overhaul, roped off a line of desks."<p>" “I worked for 42 days straight,” says Barton, whose early experience as a contract negotiator for Google had given him the skills to keep everyone on task. One of his most important jobs: He was the guy who went to McDonald’s every Saturday to pick up the hash browns."<p>"Goodson was excited about a team trip to Vegas to see Calvin Harris. There was also talk of a camping trip, but someone still had to plan it. Silbermann was already looking beyond; the team will take on the Android platform next."<p>How do most people view these parts of the article?
> Nearly three dozen designers and engineers have spent the past several months tearing out the skeleton of Pinterest’s iOS app and rebuilding it. They’ve rethought its design, down to the font. Silbermann helmed the process, bringing his kids by the office on the weekends while he checked in on the team as they raced to transform Pinterest into a sleeker, faster service. He passed up the McDonald’s hash browns that the engineers ordered, instead pitching in by testing out the new build, surfing the app on an antiquated iPad 3 and iPhone 4 to make sure it worked great even on slower devices.<p>Those are hardly antiquated and this management style should be considered an example to avoid rather than a foolish attempt to impress people with how "hard" the work was, honestly.<p>This sort of thing is for handling outages and true emergencies, not meeting arbitrary deadlines.
The core Pinterest experience has really been frustrating to me lately, and a lot of it isn't an issue in the Pinterest platform so much as the absolutely horrendous publisher sites that spam Pinterest with images that show up for my searches.<p>When I visit these sites with their clickbait images (in this case, "california style landscaping"), my iPad 2 slows to a crawl as the publishers load their 50 million ad tags. Often times the image I clicked in hopes of seeing a larger version doesn't exist, and is just a tiny thumbnail on what is clearly a site with content from Demand Media that is meant to drive ad impressions.<p>I'd LOVE for Pinterest to do something akin to FB's Instant Articles and control the entire experience (which I'm sure publishers would absolutely hate). If they provided monetization options for publishers like FB does, I could see that being very successful for Pinterest, and a huge improvement in the user experience since they wouldn't be punting people to random websites.
It seems that if Pinterest really wants to appeal to international markets in the way that Facebook and Twitter do, they should be testing on even less performant hardware than an iPhone 4 and iPad 3.
Pinterest is a good bet to succeed if it can integrate social commerce into the platform. A lot of E-commerce is going to be done over social media soon, especially fashion.