Pinterest has hired a new product boss from Microsoft

Pinterest has hired Lawrence Ripsher, a longtime Microsoft employee who led the company’s LOOP team and also worked on Bing, to lead all of its consumer products. That includes the Pinterest home feed, Pinterest’s visual search products and its new Lens product.

Ripsher will report directly to co-founder and chief product officer Evan Sharp; a company spokesperson confirmed the hire to Recode.

Ripsher’s role is an important one, especially for a consumer product company valued at $11 billion. Advertising businesses rely on scale — it’s one of the things that has plagued Twitter and scares Snap’s investors. Pinterest has 175 million monthly users, and user growth is often a result of great product changes.

Pinterest is in the midst of an important year. It hopes to generate $500 million in revenue and is putting the internal pieces in place that companies need for an IPO push. (It hired its first CFO in October, for example.)

If the company does hit its revenue goal, its business would be bigger than both Twitter’s or Snap’s businesses in the years before their IPOs.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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