Yet more personnel changes are afoot at Twitter. According to reports in Recode (here and here), the social media site is about to lose not just one but several senior executives as soon as tomorrow.
Most immediately, Katie Jacobs Stanton, the company’s VP of global media; Kevin Weil, SVP of product; and SVP of engineering Alex Roetter are all set to depart Twitter, according to the report. At the same time, the company is gearing up to announce a new chief marketing officer — it will be a high-profile female executive from a “big brand,” according to the report.
Twitter is also going to announce some new board members, as well as a new head of PR, according to Recode and a separate report in the New York Times.
We have reached out to Twitter for a response and will update as we learn more.
Update: The departures of Stanton, Weil, Roetter and head of HR Skip Schipper have now been confirmed by CEO Jack Dorsey. Separately, the head of Vine Jason Toff announced he is leaving for Google to work on VR. In Dorsey’s note, he makes it clear that the three “have chosen to leave the company” and that he is sad to confirm the news.
The departures are coming at a tumultuous time for the social network.
Faced with stagnating user growth, Twitter under new CEO Dorsey has long been grappling with the best way to evolve its business — namely, how to make its real-time stream of news, status updates from your Twitter connections, videos and other content more appealing to a mass-market audience.
This has led to the company launching new products like Moments, which aggregates Tweets and other content around specific events; considering how to expand its famous 140-character limit on updates; and much more in the names of more traffic and more advertising.
But it’s not clear if any of Twitter’s changes have been a huge hit (or are at least convincing the public that they are). Last week, as the company faced system outages in several parts of the world, its stock hit new lows.
Whatever the exact reason behind these latest departures, the fact that they are of senior people and across three such big areas of the business will likely mean they will be felt. Both Roetter and Stanton had been with Twitter since 2010, and Weil had been with the company since 2009.
It will be interesting to see who else goes at Twitter (and who arrives in their place).
Dorsey, a co-founder at the company, took on a role as its permanent CEO in October last year after having the job on an interim basis.
Many hoped that Dorsey would set the company on a more even keel, both by injecting the place with new ideas but also by providing the kind of deep understanding of a company that perhaps only a founder can have (essential for a company that seems to have lost its way). The results, however, have been mixed.
Dorsey is trying to navigate Twitter through tricky waters at the same time that he is CEO of another company. Square, which he also co-founded, only went public in November 2015 and is facing its own struggles in the markets.
Twitter is due to announce its quarterly results on February 10.
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