Twitter announced that Ali Rowghani, the company's chief operating officer, has resigned after clashing with the company's chief executive officer Dick Costolo over whether Rowghani will continue overseeing Twitter's product development.
Chloe Sladden, the company's vice president of media and a direct report of Rowghani, sent in her resignation some hours later.
Formerly Pixar's chief financial officer, Rowghani joined Twitter in 2010 under the same position and then appointed as chief operating officer in 2012. Rowghani oversaw the company's product development, dealmaking and finances. He was credited with orchestrating financing deals that culminated in Twitter's successful initial public offering in 2013. Rowghani was also given the task last year of increasing the number of users and revenue of Twitter.
Rowghani's departure was supported by the company's board of directors as Rowghani seemingly failed to drive up user growth, with the price of Twitter's shares trading at almost half the value that they were going for half a year earlier.
Costolo had a private goal in 2013 to raise the number of Twitter users to 400 million last year. At 255 million users for the first quarter of this year, the company is far behind that goal and is nowhere near Facebook's 1.3 billion users.
Twitter said that it is not planning to seek a replacement for Rowghani, with the former top executive's responsibilities to be distributed to other officials in the company. The duty of handling Twitter's product development has been passed to Costolo.
However, Twitter's goal to increase their user base might not be solved with personnel changes in top management, some analysts say. It could be because of the high expectations for the company's goal.
"The issue for Twitter is not per se the management team," said Daniel Ernst, an analyst for Hudson Square Research. "I think they are doing all the right things. The issue for Twitter is not Twitter, it's that the expectations Twitter could become as big as Facebook were incorrect."
Rowghani's faith and commitment to the company was questioned when he sold 300,000 Twitter shares under his name to rake in a $9.9 million profit, at a point when the prices of the shares had reached close to an all-time low. In contrast, Costolo and Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey have promised to hold on to their shares.
Rowghani's departure follows the resignation of Twitter product chief Michael Sippey in January. It wasn't until months later when Sippey's replacement, Google Maps leader Daniel Graf, came onboard the company.
Upon announcement of Rowghani's departure, the price of Twitter stocks increased 3.5 percent to $36.80.
