Audrey is a product lead on the Discovery team at Pinterest, where her team recently launched a new feature called Instant Ideas. We chatted about the ups and downs of that process, the best practices she's learned after a decade of building mobile software, and more:

• What a good personalized discovery experience requires
• The advantages of an iterative product development process that combines user research and experimentation at scale
• How to overcome the new user cold start problem and strike a balance between gathering signal and adding friction
• The different stages of comprehension and the impact of details like animation latency
• Why the team moved away from the heart as a symbol for the affinity action, and how they landed on a circle instead
• The importance of considering ecosystem effects when introducing a new type of signal into recommendation systems
• How to match the prominence of a feature with the value people get out of it and how frequently it's used
• Why good user experiences are about being contextually aware as opposed to being consistent
• Her advice for aspiring product managers