With a career spanning over two decades at the intersection of product and marketing, Andréa drives transformative growth by blending product innovation with the art and science of storytelling. She leads an integrated Product, Design, Research & Insights, Go-To-Market, Marketing, Communications, and Creative team that delivers exceptional end-to-end customer experiences and breakthrough business impact.
At Pinterest, she’s been named a three-time Forbes Most Influential CMO, Adweek Brand Genius, and an Ad Age Marketer of the Year. Her teams are responsible for profitably acquiring millions of high-quality, incremental users through data-centric and creatively bold brand, product, and performance marketing. She oversees product design, UX, research, and all go-to-market motions for consumer, advertiser, and creator audiences, and has built an award-winning in-house creative studio responsible for major brand activations and integrated campaigns.
Previously, Andréa was the CMO of Athleta, where she received the 2018 CMO Award for Creativity & Storytelling, and CMO of Omada Health, a digital health company named a "Tech Pioneer" by the World Economic Forum. She spent nearly eight years with IDEO, where she helped establish and lead the global brand strategy practice as a Design Director in both the US and Europe.
A published author and in-demand speaker, Andréa writes and speaks on product innovation, growth, brand strategy, entrepreneurship, and design thinking, with work featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Fast Company. She has lived and worked in cities including Paris, London, Munich, San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Toronto, and holds a master’s degree from the London School of Economics.
Looking back, my through-line is actually pretty simple: I always start with people.
Whether it was digital health, apparel, or consumer tech, my first question is, “What problem are we really solving in someone’s life, and why would they let us into that story?” That keeps you humble and close to the consumer.
The second question is always about the product, not the marketing. I believe great CMOs need to be great product people, first and foremost. It’s about understanding the types of products and features we need to build in order to earn the right to tell the most impactful, differentiated, and defensible stories in the market. I’ve always been hyper-focused on helping shape the product first, and the stories needed to drive growth second.
The other constant is that I see driving growth as a team sport. Great ideas do not respect org charts. My job is to set a very clear “why” and then create the conditions for talented people to do the best work of their careers with psychological safety, high standards, and room to experiment. The context changes, the industries change, but that philosophy really doesn’t.
The CMOs who thrive are those who treat change as their native environment, not as an occasional disruption.
Today’s CMO has to be as comfortable in a product review or data deep‑dive as in a creative pitch. The job is no longer just about communications; it’s about orchestrating the entire end‑to‑end experience. It’s one of the reasons I took on communications, product marketing and product design to become our chief marketing and communications officer.
You can break it down into three principles:
In practice, it’s less about slogans and more about how we actually work together.
We design for what I call “good collisions.” Some of our best ideas have come when marketers, product designers, engineers, and sales folks are all in the same room, solving the same problem. So we’re intentional about creating those moments, whether it’s for Pinterest Presents, Cannes, or a big brand campaign.
And then we talk openly about what didn’t work. When people see that a smart risk that failed isn’t a career‑ender, they’re much more likely to take bold swings. That’s where real creativity lives.
Choose the bigger risk and better story. When I graduated university, I had the option to accept a great internship at a very big company minutes from where I grew up. It was the kind of role thousands of students competed to earn, and I was lucky enough to be offered a spot.
I had an instinct, though, that if I did that, my life might become very small and impossibly boring. What’s more, I didn’t know myself very well yet, and staying in the same environment where I’d lived most of my life would probably make that worse.
So, on a whim, I moved to Paris to be a bartender, instead. What looked like a catastrophically bad career move on the surface ended up kicking off a series of wonderful life adventures. Twenty-five years later, I never actually made it back home, instead living in five different countries, ten different cities, and using three different languages.
Everything that makes me strong as a leader today can be traced back to that first bad decision and first great job. I learned to adapt, to find my inner grit, to be curious about other cultures and ways of seeing the world. It changed who I was and made me so much more a world citizen than I could have otherwise dreamt of being.
Sian Beilock, President of Dartmouth College.
My husband David and three children: Finn, Lucy, and Eloise.
I’m excited to see a generation of users – especially Gen Z – demanding that digital tools be as healthy as they are useful. Having a big follower count used to be a flex — now it’s a red flag. Gen Z are increasingly turning to dumb phones, old school cameras, and prioritizing in-person experiences. I believe they will increasingly say, “My mental wellbeing is no longer for sale”.
We’re at an inflection point with AI where we can choose to amplify anxiety and division, or to design for inspiration, wellbeing, and true personalization.
At Pinterest, we’re very focused on the latter – using AI to power what I think of as “positive discovery.” That means helping people find ideas that reflect their real selves, across body types, skin tones, interests, and life stages, and then turning that inspiration into action.
It might be crazy to say as a mobile app and platform, but our explicit goal is to get people offline and doing real things that help them create a life they love.
The Road To Character by David Brooks
