Twitter Exec Shakeup Storm Keeps Brewing

In the wake of Twitter’s weekend announcement that heads rolled and heads were replaced, deeper questions are being asked as to whether the company is indeed providing a service that is destined to find real stickiness and longevity.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets on Monday (Jan. 25), the company faces a rough hurdle in the sense that it is not gaining the user traction that it would want and that has led to the ouster of tech head Kevin Weil, now being replaced by Adam Messinger. That means the head of products at Twitter has been filled by no less than five people in the past nine years. WSJ noted that social media rival Facebook has managed to have just one person in the top product spot through the same timeframe.

There’s been some speculation that CEO Jack Dorsey was the impetus behind bringing Messinger in over Weil, with a shakeup that seemed to indicate just who is in charge (despite the fact that Messinger has relatively less consumer product experience than his predecessor). But now, noted WSJ, the engineering and product teams will be reporting to the same executive for the first time in several years, which might lead to better communications between those two sides of the product coin.

In the meantime, shares in Twitter’s stock were down by 4 percent, and even social media had negative impressions of the move, Reuters noted. Various tweets pointed out how the ranks of stalwarts (and multi-year tenures) at the company were running low. Sentiment, as measured by a Thomson Reuters index, showed that social media commentary about the company has been negative for the past two weeks and has now fallen to the lowest level in the past year.