The new CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, has a clear message: anticipate that the social network should move much quicker than it has previously.
In his first public appearance since assuming control over Twitter from co-founder Jack Dorsey, Agrawal says his top priority is “improving our execution” and streamlining how Twitter works. His comments, made at the Barclays technology conference, come after activist investor Elliott Management stirred up Twitter’s board of directors last year and constrained Dorsey to step down from his part-time CEO role. Dorsey stays the CEO of Block (officially called Square).
Notwithstanding being Twitter’s CEO for just nine days, Agrawal has as of now rolled out huge improvements to its upper ranks. He reorganized the organization last Friday under the key pillars of Consumer, Revenue, and Core Tech, with a general manager running every division. “I believe we have set them up so they can really move fast,” he currently says. As part of the change, two executives who previously reported to Dorsey — engineering lead Michael Montano and Dantley Davis, the head of design and research — plan to leave toward the finish of December.
“We were operating previously in a functional structure where we had a single engineering organization, a single design research organization, and product teams that were matrixed into them,” Agrawal says, inferring that the setup slowed the organization down. Alongside the three new general managers — who are Kayvon Beykpour, Bruce Falck, and Nick Caldwell — Lindsey Iannucci was named VP of Operations. “She’s going to help us improve our operational rigor in this new structure to really get us to faster decision making, clearer ownership, increased accountability, improved operations, which will result in faster execution overall and better results,” as per Agrawal.
His attention on speed was a reoccurring theme all through the approximately 30-minute interview. He clarified how, in his past role as chief technology officer, he focused on modifying the organization’s aged technical stack with the goal that products could be sent faster. He admitted there has been “slow decision making because of so much coordination that needed to happen” between teams to get changes out the door. His comments added up to a direct affirmation that Twitter hasn’t met expectations from investors since it went public, and that the organization has been delayed to address shifts in user behavior over the years.
At the point when gotten some information about Twitter’s simply declared procurement of the messaging app Quill, Agrawal called direct messages as “a key product bet” — a refreshing opinion given that DMs have been tragically underdeveloped for a long time. “The opportunity around DMs is really key,” he said, adding that “it’s a way you can connect with anyone in the world and expect to hear back from them.”