Interim Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said his product team’s shortcomings are “unacceptable.” Now, they’re walking out the door.
Jack Dorsey is experiencing his first wave of executive departures since returning to Twitter as interim CEO earlier this month.
Dorsey lost three top product execs this week. On Tuesday, right after the company's earnings results were announced, news broke that Director of Product Management Todd Jackson and Head of Growth Christian Oestlien were on the way out.
And then, on Friday, Twitter confirmed to Re/Code that Trevor O'Brien, the product lead in charge of the company's apps, is also leaving.
The departures could be little shakers that amount to nothing, or tremors foreshadowing a larger tectonic shift.
Dorsey hasn't hid his dissatisfaction with Twitter's product efforts. He's also made clear that he's willing to rethink the social media platform's fundamentals in order to grow the service.
"Product initiatives we'd mentioned in previous earnings calls, like Instant Timelines and Logged-Out experiences, have not yet had meaningful impact on growing our audience or participation," Dorsey said during the earnings call earlier this week. "This is unacceptable and we're not happy about it."
Both Oestlien and Jackson are headed to new jobs — Oestlien to YouTube and Jackson to Dropbox. There's no word yet on what O'Brien's plans are.
The moves didn't happen overnight, but the wheels begin turning during times of uncertainty: That head hunter you turned down a few times all of a sudden gets a few minutes. One conversation turns into another. And then it's decision time.
As Dorsey sets out to remake the company, he's losing a fair deal of institutional knowledge. But for someone who's said, "I want us to question everything to make it better," that may not be a bad thing.
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