Twitter is undergoing a major restructure of its business, as several top product executives of the company will be leaving while new board members will be taking their seats.
The departures will be the first significant ones since Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of the social media platform who returned to lead the company as its CEO
It can be remembered that one of the first actions of Dorsey, upon his return to Twitter's top position, was to enforce layoffs on almost all of the departments of the company. Dorsey fired a total of 336 employees in October, which was equivalent to about 8.2 percent of the social network's 4,100 global employees, with most of the layoffs in the engineering and product function divisions of the company.
Dorsey, apparently, was not finished with the layoffs, as the restructuring would reach even the highest levels of leadership in Twitter.
The social network's top ranks will be undergoing a major overhaul over the coming few weeks, the New York Times reported, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The report claimed that Twitter will be announcing its two new members of the board soon, though who the two people are were not revealed. According to the sources, however, one of the new board members of Twitter is a high-profile personality in the media industry.
The company has actually been looking for additional board members since the appointment of Omid Kordestani, a former executive of Google, as Twitter's executive chairman in October of last year.
Twitter will also be appointing a new chief marketing officer, as several executives will be vacating their positions.
Twitter senior VP of engineering, Alex Roetter, is one of the executives that will soon leave the company, along with senior VP of product Kevin Weil and VP of global media Katie Jacobs Stanton. Vine General Manager Jason Toff, which saw Twitter acquire the social video app back in 2012, will also be exiting the company and will look to rejoin Google as a member of its virtual reality initiatives.
Dorsey, in a tweet, clarified press rumors and stated that the executives are the ones that decided to leave the company,
The overhaul of the social network is driven by the fact that the value of its stock has decreased by half over the past year, with Twitter failing to implement improvements and upgrades fast enough to turn around the social media platform's dwindling user growth.
Dorsey's plan to reverse the fortunes of Twitter and take it out of its current user growth slump is to enhance the product, with the social media platform targeted to be made easier to use and less intimidating for new users. Dorsey even mentioned that no feature in Twitter is sacred, which has led to experiments on the social networking service such as reversing the chronological timeline of tweets and possibly breaking the longstanding 140-character limit of the platform.
"Twitter will become the first thing everyone in the world checks to start their day and the first thing people turn to when they want to share ideas, commentary or simply what's happening," Dorsey said on his vision on what he wants for Twitter.
