Pinterest · Performance+ · Dec 2022 to Oct 2025

The standard four teams shipped against.

Automation asks an advertiser to hand over the controls. Performance+ had to be worth the trade.

Role
Senior Product Designer to Staff Product DesignerDesign lead, Ads Automation · across 5 designers, 2 researchers, 4 teams
Company
PinterestMonetization · Ads Platform
Timeline
Dec 2022 to Oct 2025Vision, 100% rollout (GA), roadmap
Impact
$600M+ annual revenueBeat year-one target by 57%
01The stakes
Dec 2022

Advantage+ and Performance Max, rival automation tools, had a multi-year head start.

Year one beat the $7M bar by 57%; $600M+ is the run rate at full availability.

Advertisers were already moving billions into automated campaigns on other platforms. Pinterest had nothing to sell them.

Setting up one campaign still took 30+ manual decisions. I had already written the framework for what good automation should look like, starting from what an advertiser was trying to do. Nothing had been built on it yet. The first-year revenue target was $7M.

The automation piece isn't about doing the work for the human. It's about making the work less taxing on the human.

Standard setup · 30+ decisions
  • Choose targeting criteria
  • Set bid strategy manually
  • Configure demographics
  • Select interest categories
  • Define where ads appear
  • Manage creative rotation
  • Set frequency caps
  • + 23 more…
Performance+ · 3 inputs
01What's your goal?
02What's your budget?
03Upload your creative.
The system handles the rest.

Leadership wanted “simple.” Simplicity is a byproduct of removing what doesn't yield value, not a goal in itself.

The reframe that set the design agenda
02The standard
Aug 2023 onward

Vision work began August 2023, before the P+ mandate existed. When the org committed, it became the foundation.

Four teams had been working separately. A weekly review across all four became the thing everyone planned around.

Eng wanted incremental migration; Sales wanted both flows. The line held: half-automation erodes trust faster than full commitment.

Performance+ touched every surface in Ads Manager. Seven features, four teams.

Frameworks

I wrote the Optimal Setup Framework before Performance+ had a mandate or a slot on a roadmap. It started from what an advertiser was trying to do and set every default downstream from there. Performance+ is one implementation of it. The automation product for smaller advertisers is another. PM, Eng, and PMM all worked off it.

Team

Led five designers and two researchers. Grew a junior into owning the core creation flow; coached the designer who went on to lead the Value Expression line.

Research

Directed the studies behind the biggest bets. Does the number of conversions matter more, or their value? What are the tradeoffs between bid signals and constraints?

Adoption

Designed how advertisers found out it existed: upsell modals, account banners, messaging keyed to where they were in the journey. Active automated campaigns grew 15× in three weeks.

Fig. 01 · Optimal Setup Framework. Advertiser intent, meaning objective, budget, and creative type, informs every downstream configuration.
Optimal Setup Framework diagram: advertiser intent mapped to downstream configuration.
Fig. 02 · Range of Automation. Full auto, fine-tuned, recommendations, manual. Defined which advertisers belong at each level and why.
Range of Automation framework: full auto to manual.
Fig. 03 · Vision concepts, August 2023. Advertisers describe their goal in plain language; the system captures intent, configures optimal defaults, and preserves control for those who want it.
Vision concept slide 1 of 11 Vision concept slide 2 of 11 Vision concept slide 3 of 11 Vision concept slide 4 of 11 Vision concept slide 5 of 11 Vision concept slide 6 of 11 Vision concept slide 7 of 11 Vision concept slide 8 of 11 Vision concept slide 9 of 11 Vision concept slide 10 of 11 Vision concept slide 11 of 11
Slide show 01 / 11
03Shipped
Oct 2024

From 30+ decisions to three inputs: roughly 60% fewer clicks and less time to a live campaign.

Benchmarked with keystroke-level modeling against Pinterest's standard flow and competing automated products. Every decision point that survived had to earn its keep. The rule was optimal by default, flexible when needed. Trust took one more thing: the system saying out loud when it was still learning.

Fig. 04 · Campaign creation. From multiple panels and 30+ manual decisions to one flow: objective, budget, creative.
Campaign creation before and after: multiple panels reduced to one flow.
Fig. 05 · Product positioning. Pinterest's external framing of Performance+ adopted the Range of Automation framework, organizing the product family across bidding, creative, and targeting.
Pinterest's external Performance+ positioning organized by the Range of Automation framework.
Fig. 06 · Learning Phase in reporting. The system says when campaign data is reliable and when the machine is still calibrating. Trust is a reporting feature, and this is where it shipped.
Learning Phase state in Pinterest ads reporting.
$600M+
Annual revenue at GA
57%
Over year-one target
15×
Campaign growth, 3 wks
7
Features across 4 teams
“Our ad innovations, like Performance+, have a compounding effect over time… We've seen a 20% CPA improvement for advertisers using Performance+ for shopping campaigns.”
Bill Ready CEO, Pinterest · Q4 2024 earnings call
04What it seeded
2025 → 2026

Bid Multiplier shipped first; the broader value expression vision cleared product and design leadership review.

The 2023 vision kept shipping after GA.

Value Expression · “When is performance not enough?” became a product family, $104M in Q4. 2026 roadmap
AI-forward creation · plain-language intent capture; the system builds the campaign around it. 2026 roadmap
Campaign Optimization Score · the feedback loop for detecting suboptimal setups. In experiment
Priority Products · bid prioritization by product group: margin, inventory, seasonality. 2026 roadmap
CTV + offsite extension · Performance+ beyond Pinterest, with AI-powered creative transformation. In progress

Four teams picked the frameworks up and kept building on them. New designers are still onboarded through the framework the work was built on. Bid Multiplier shipped. The CTV extension is still in progress.

The first simplification cut too far. I'd written the principle about capturing true constraints, the geographic ones and the regulatory ones, and then cut past it anyway. Exclusions came back, then age gates for regulated categories, then reporting breakdowns. Every one of them was a real business need I'd argued was noise.

Next case study Value Expression Signals, not constraints. The reframe that seeded $104M in Q4. Read →
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