Pinterest today announced its new hire, Sabrina Ellis, to assume the role of head of product offering. Ellis spent the last 12 years at Google, where she led work on the Google Pixel. Previously, she spent eight years at Yahoo (TechCrunch’s parent company) in numerous leadership roles.
Sabrina will be joining Pinterest on May 15. She will replace Pinterest’s current senior vice president of products, Naveen Gavini, who will remain with the company until the end of September.
In his new role, Ellis will lead the product design and management teams, reporting directly to Pinterest CEO Bill Ready.
The overall goal of the company is to make everything on Pinterest shoppable. For example, in July 2022, Pinterest launched a API for purchases, so that merchants can create engaging shopping experiences for users (also known as Pinners). It also implemented a Shop tab for businesses to display all of their shoppable products.
During his last earnings call, Ready mentioned that Pinterest is also working on making videos shoppable. In addition, the company is currently testing purchasing capabilities for Shuffles, his collage maker app.
Ellis will be responsible for helping to accelerate this goal by further integrating the Pinterest shopping experience into the home feed and search function. In today’s announcement, the company reiterated its plans to make the pins purchasable.
“I am delighted to join the amazing team at Pinterest. In a world where finding inspiration is more important than ever, I have long admired how Pinterest stands out as the platform that helps people turn real-life dreams into real-world action,” Ellis said in a statement. “Throughout my career, I have been passionate about providing users with experiences that enhance their lives and foster positivity. Pinterest is a natural fit for me to pursue this passion, and I’m excited to create a world where inspiration and emotional well-being go so authentically together.”
“I am excited to have Sabrina lead the next phase of innovation at Pinterest while leading the most talented and hard-working people I have ever had the privilege to work and learn with,” Gavini said.
After 10 years, Gavini is retiring to continue the next chapter of his career, the company wrote.
Gavini has worked on almost every major new product at Pinterest, including his time as guided search engineeryour search engine released in 2014 to give users an in-depth discovery experience with the use of descriptive guides.
“When I joined Pinterest, I was motivated by the idea of building a one-of-a-kind platform for people to discover inspiration for all aspects of their lives,” added Gavini. “More than a decade later, I am grateful for the opportunity to have helped scale Pinterest to a place that inspires hundreds of millions of users around the world.”
As of February, Pinterest has 450 million monthly active users around the world.