They need to do more than get rid of the higher up executives. If they aren't that good, then everyone from middle management up needs to be cleared out. What they do instead is regularly clear out others and it results in nothing but a weaker environment and more fear-based maneuvering (which is probably what's desired given how weak Twitter's management is).
Twitter gets fairly good ratings on Glassdoor overall, but settles on a 3.2/5 for senior management (ie, even Google's 3.9/5 rating is reflective of poorly regarded senior management). In order to think of management as good (according to Glassdoor), they need a 4.0/5. If they get a 4.2/5 or higher, then they can be considered elite or special.
That is, they need to get rid of their crap middle management that's likely getting in the way of everything and driving it all (slowly) into the ground, then use the space that creates to get people in who know what they are doing and that are about progressing forward.
> They need to do more than get rid of the higher up executives.
Adam Bain built Twitter's ad business from scratch to a respectable ARPU on a product that many thought was not conducive to it. It's arguably one of the only achievements at Twitter since the original concept was born.
He is the fall guy for flattening revenue while user growth and product remain stagnant, while other execs increase their own spending by $1.5B a year and make zero improvement to either of these metrics.
They are the ones who need to go - that they're not being held accountable is bad.
With excessive focus on ads, he was also responsible for a weaker product and also a weaker platform for developers. Can someone who worked at Twitter chime in?
Twitter was always a weak platform for developers and I don't think ads had anything to do with the many developer-unfriendly decisions that Twitter has taken over the years.
Well, your engineering team can either focus on optimizing the platform for ads and doing integrations with third parties or focus on building a great product.
I'm not saying anything about Adam Bain or anyone else, as I'm not clear on who specifically is good or bad. What I am saying is that Twitter's senior management is poor and needs to be replaced.
Middle management is a really easy area for a growing company to end up weak in. If you promote a junior manager (out of necessity, or as a reward for being a very good junior manager) who's never seen what good higher level management looks like, they don't even know enough about what they don't know.
And then most junior managers never end up seeing it. Took me a while before I did - I liked my boss, even, but then they left and someone new came in, and the difference was night and day. Being able to come into a new place and figure out what details to focus on and what to not, identify common problem areas, identify people to delegate to and trust, get upper-management support for you when necessary, figure out where you're still uncomfortable and how to get you to start stretching yourself there... it's not stuff I knew I was missing. And I could've gone another decade without knowing it, probably!
Late edit: the more I see of the skills it takes to be good at it, and how easily it can be a thankless role, the more I'm kinda terrified even more of that jump than the dev->manager jump.
> And then most junior managers never end up seeing it. Took me a while before I did - I liked my boss, even, but then they left and someone new came in, and the difference was night and day. Being able to come into a new place and figure out what details to focus on and what to not, identify common problem areas, identify people to delegate to and trust, get upper-management support for you when necessary, figure out where you're still uncomfortable and how to get you to start stretching yourself there... it's not stuff I knew I was missing. And I could've gone another decade without knowing it, probably!
Perhaps a silly question, and definitely tangential, but do you have resources / pointers on where to learn about these kinds of skills? Or is that what MBA's are for? (sounds snarky but meant sincerely)
Peter Drucker & W. Edwards Deming
These are the two best management thinkers of the 20th century and they are largely ignored today.
Here's your chance to engage in some information arbitrage and profit.
Drucker wrote A LOT. Assumption from your question: you have yet to gain much, if any, idea about what good management is. If so, The Daily Drucker [1] is a good, easily digestible entry point to the entire body of Peter Drucker's work.
Deming came from a statistics, systems, and manufacturing background, which at a glance, makes his work seem from a different world. That couldn't be more wrong. His principles are broadly applicable. Toyota and much of Japanese industry post-WWII learned from Deming and built their businesses on his principles. The easiest place to start with him is with his 14 Points [2].
Read a bit. Compare it to what you have seen or not seen in your work experience. Read more.
I spend a lot of time thinking about management and the more I learn, the less convinced I am that there has been anything truly new since these two thinkers.
The reviews on Comparably suggests the executives at Twitter are more of a problem than middle management. That is, they get a rating of 63/100, versus middle management's 71/100. I suppose it doesn't matter either way, as 75/100 (or 80 is even better) would be the lowest score I'd be comfortable with.
Ratings according to Engineers: executives = 66/100 and managers = 75/100.
When is Dorsey going to step down? Running two successful, public businesses is damn near impossible. Running two public companies that are both in dire straits? Get outta here.
It was incredibly irresponsible of the board to allow him to come back in the CEO role, and they need to put an end to it.
I blame the board for Dorsey and for most of the other problems. (Yes, I know he's a member of the board...)
It's inevitable that a lot of executive positions get filled by personal connections, and it's inevitable that board members reward their friends, etc. Despite that, many businesses end up being run pretty well. However, the Twitter board has extremely irresponsible and negligent -- far more so than is normally the case.
I don't think any executive reshuffles or new CEOs will help, because the board contributes as much to the problem as anyone else.
They aren't necessarily in dire straits, but it seems their (prematurely) slowing growth has many spooked, and it is also puzzling, as they shouldn't have slown down this quickly.
Also, many complain about Twitter's user experience, overall product, and lack of desire to tend to its users and their needs.
Essentially, it seems they just stalled out, are slowly drifting deeper into mediocrity, and aren't going anywhere. Though with growth still present (as their stock price is now more aligned with their projected growth rate) and a large (billions in IPO proceeds) cash cushion relative to their size.
How is any of Square's performance surprising though? I would be surprised if they are able to be more successful than other ISOs in the payment processing industry, and at this point the little niche they had has been commoditized like the rest of the industry.
Clover Go, Paypal Here, etc are eating their marketshare and can beat them on rates all day long, except for customers that don't make sense (high Amex/Visa Infinite usage), and First Data and their ISOs are happy to let Square lay there and bleed out from those "customers".
I really wish the restrictions can be reduced or removed so board of directors (like @pmarca) and CEOs can tweet more on public companies, which is part of what I mean by "Yishan-style CEOs".
Not much accountability from the CEO for stagnant product vision and direction. I guess if I founded Twitter I wouldnt fire myself either, but if I was their board I would think about it.
Seeing the rise of Noto as other executives and leaders fall away, are removed, or otherwise leave Twitter makes me wonder how much longer Dorsey can hold on to his job, especially after the embarrassment of the failed acquisition talks. It's like watching Game of Thrones, but in real life.
2 - they think they can be the ones to turn it around (what, execs, big egos? unrealistic expectations? complete faith in their self as savior of mankind? surely you jest.)
And of course if (2) falls down and they can't steer the ship, they can leverage their new position (3) and big bags of money (1) to go move somewhere else.
While change is always hard I think Twitter can use some new and hungry people to drive it in a new direction. Its such an important service and I really wish them all the best.
Twitter and facebook is supressing peoples opinions/comments/articles and deleting they accounts when they ideology is not mainstream "suitable". For me both medias are big disappointment.
Do you guys ever get tired of me pointing out that it will still be a Unicorn when it trades at 1/10th of the price and has a sustainable business model? We call those success stories, but lets be honest, its the share price you are worried about.
I still do not understand why twitter needs one. Fire everyone, bring on a skeleton crew of engineers to fix bugs, and maybe 4 product engineers, a couple managers and a couple designers. Boom, instantly ultra profitable.
LOL. With that amount of users and exposure, they would need a huge legal team to handle all the complaints from users, companies and governments. And an even larger customer service team. So a tiny product team, with legal and CS departments of 200+ is not going to be a well balanced company.
You would need quite a few engineers just to handle tweaks requested by legal and CS. Just a few engineers to handle the mature (ie probably spaghetti) ecosphere of systems in their architecture is never going to scale. Nor to just stop it falling apart, never mind progressing any new features.
From their talks about their architecture, their massive "Source" repository etc its sounds like they had 1000s of commits per day across hundreds of systems. Ie like many larger companies. To keep up that velocity would need a lot of developers and overhead staff. Even if they cut away "nice to have" systems, sunset a lot of apps and projects, and focused only on a lean core that would still be a huge architecture, which needs X amounts of staff to maintain and progress. What X is a I don't know. Maybe 50, maybe 200, maybe 1000.
Likely part of their valuation is built around expected future growth and innovation. It becomes hard to maintain that story if you cut your engineering too deep.
Twitter gets fairly good ratings on Glassdoor overall, but settles on a 3.2/5 for senior management (ie, even Google's 3.9/5 rating is reflective of poorly regarded senior management). In order to think of management as good (according to Glassdoor), they need a 4.0/5. If they get a 4.2/5 or higher, then they can be considered elite or special.
That is, they need to get rid of their crap middle management that's likely getting in the way of everything and driving it all (slowly) into the ground, then use the space that creates to get people in who know what they are doing and that are about progressing forward.