Annie Ta starts every day with morning meditation and a kale smoothie. Before the day is through, she and her toddler call her grandmother. That routine is part of how she keeps herself grounded—she balances the long hours of working with A.I. with human interaction.
As head of inclusive product at Pinterest, Ta uses integrated features to help Pinners from all walks of life have a positive experience with the platform. The most important part of her job is remembering that humans are the ones using the app. She’s inspired by the visual nature of the platform, and is on a mission to ensure that everyone, no matter who they are or how they identify, can see themselves on Pinterest.
“Building inclusive products is a completely new field,” Ta says. “Not everyone understands what it feels like to have that moment like me, where I've looked at magazine covers and I don't feel represented. So being able to tell the story—the power behind what it actually feels like and have that kind of moment where you realize you're impacting real people—that is so important in everything we do day to day.”
Thanks to Ta, anyone using a nonbranded beauty search on Pinterest should see a diverse range of skin tones in the top 10 results. She’s behind that skin-tone range feature you see at the top of your makeup-inspo searches.
She’s creatively and technically skilled, and blends these to improve Pinterest as a platform. Ta thinks of the app as an interactive experience, and the natural desire to feel seen shapes her thinking in building these products.
“There are so many problems that you could address in the world,” Ta says. “We're not always trying to boil the ocean. But you can do one small thing that helps people a little bit, and that butterfly effect can be sometimes just immeasurable.”
For Glamour’s Doing the Work series, Annie Ta talks about reframing rejection, finding a creative outlet, and representation for WOC in tech.
Glamour: I know you consider Pinterest to be a dream job—what was your childhood dream job?
Annie Ta: I grew up the daughter of immigrants, and I think that my parents’ definition of success was always “become a doctor.” I think that I wanted to become a doctor. In college I was a biology major, but I decided to focus on looking at how medicine impacts disadvantaged communities. I really studied things about children, as well as underrepresented groups, and how medicine and health impacts them. On the flip side of things, I always wanted to be an art teacher. In the very early parts of my life, I loved to draw and color. I can't say I'm a particularly great artist. It doesn't matter what kind of outcome there is or what I make. It always has felt really positive.
Explain the moment you realized, “Okay, I might actually be successful.”
People use Pinterest for inspiration. But sometimes you actually need inspiration when you're feeling a little bit down. So if you're stressed or anxious about things, people search for things like “stress quotes” or “anxiety quotes,” just as a way to kind of unlock inspiration for themselves or feel a little bit better. We saw people were doing that so much that we decided to build an experience called compassionate search.
