Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

This part caught my attention:<p>&gt; Davis, previously a director of product design at Facebook, joined Twitter in 2019 to lead its design team. He is Black and Asian, and was the first Black executive at Twitter to report directly to the CEO. The company had touted him as a hard-charging leader who would detoxify the platform, but he was also criticized by some employees for what they said was a blunt, aggressive management style.<p>Since they&#x27;ve clearly gone for the &quot;diversity&quot; angle here, I decided to read more[0] about Davis.<p>&gt; The comment occurred during a meeting in which Liz Ferrall-Nunge, who led Twitter’s research team, shared concerns about diversity at Twitter and referred to her experience as a woman of color. Mr. Davis seemed to dismiss her, telling Ms. Ferrall-Nunge, who is Asian American, that if she wore sunglasses, she would pass as white, three people familiar with the investigation said.<p>…Wow.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20210816090522&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;08&#x2F;16&#x2F;technology&#x2F;twitter-culture-change-conflict.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20210816090522&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytim...</a>

Contrast to Apple, which uses a fully functional model: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;how-apple-is-organized-for-innovation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio...</a><p>I find this evolution fascinating. It makes sense to me that the GM model worked for so long. If much of a company&#x27;s advantages were cultural, you could put together teams that could out-compete startups within a large organization. Procter and Gamble needs to enter new markets with new products to grow -- there&#x27;s only so big a market for soap or razors or drills.<p>But lots of tech companies today have a significant scale advantage. Google ads is most of their revenue; Netflix has a single product. Functional expertise that drives a 2% gain across the entire business is possible and valuable.<p>So ... why does Twitter want to go to a GM model? Are they watching Meta have success diversifying from Facebook? Or is there something else?

The CEO has been with twitter for 10 years and been CTO and actively involved at top-level decisions for quite some time. This isn&#x27;t some sudden decision pulled out of a hat. Not sure why some commenters seem to have such knee-jerk reactions to this change. Most of it seems to be sensible. The CEO came up through the ranks from starting off as an individual contributor at Twitter. He probably has a good grasp for what organizational changes can help the company and it is also very likely that this has been in the works for a while.

Boy is for-profit operation a downer. We get so much from Twitter, but of course, that doesn&#x27;t make enough money, so the march towards locking it down into a closed pipeline of corporate marketing&#x2F;ads&#x2F;curation&#x2F;tracking for the product (us) at the expense of whatever made twitter great continues on. Like, my third party Twitter clients have less and less functionality as Twitter removes public API features. My ability to read Twitter without ads&#x2F;paid tweets injected into my feed will likely go away, etc.

I know little about how Twitter works, but it&#x27;s interesting that a new leader would make such sweeping changes just a few days into the job. Usually, you would want at least a little time viewing and understanding the org from your new job&#x2F;perspective before changing anything major.<p>It sort of implies a CEO decision coming from solely a CTO perspective.

Implicit in all these diversity pushes is a fixed-sized pie mentality. In that world-view, the only way to increase diversity is to replace white[1] executives with non-white ones. I&#x27;m not keen on the long term prospects of a company that is making its senior leadership hiring decisions based on a fixed-sized pie mindset. Frankly, while I&#x27;m not a fan of the racial discrimination aspect either, the lack of a growth mindset is what really predicts failure.<p>[1] The status of South and East Asians isn&#x27;t entirely clear to me here. In my time in big tech I never noticed a shortage of South Asian senior leaders, so I suppose maybe they&#x27;re no longer considered diverse? As for East Asians, every single one I&#x27;ve personally worked with is a big fan of meritocracy. Perhaps that&#x27;s because they believe they will do well under those rules.

I always feel that most reorgs are done not because they lead to a fundamentally better structure but just to shake up things and break some managers&#x27; fiefdoms that are causing political problems. You could almost pick two or three structures and rotate every three years (which basically happens when leaders get replaced).<p>After some decades in the industry I think any organizational structure will work if people are honest with each other and leadership proactively addresses problems. I have had countless situations where I pointed out to a VP that certain functions aren&#x27;t performing and are causing problems for other projects but the VP just shrugged and basically said &quot;there is nothing we can do&quot;. Considering that corporations are basically internally run like communist planned economies they share the same pathologies like counterproductive metrics, people pretending things are great and leadership ignoring glaring problems.

&quot;New hire announces that they intend to do their job&quot;

It&#x27;s about time, Twitter has failed to deliver for far too long and it&#x27;s pretty clear things had to seriously change. I think the details of the structure are probably unimportant - these reorganisations are more about moving people up or out. It&#x27;s all a bit academic since it&#x27;ll all change once Twitter is acquired anyway.

Sucks, enjoy your silos.

Paywall

The URL should be changed to cite the Wapo&#x27;s story: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;03&#x2F;twitter-agrawal-restructuring&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;03&#x2F;twitter...</a>

I honestly wonder if a CEO who grew up outside the US is going to be a good steward of the uniquely American attitude towards free speech. Honestly, I don’t have a lot of hope for it.

&gt; The changes include moving to a &quot;General Manager model&quot; for teams in the product and technology organizations, which will mean having one person lead the work in those divisions. &quot;This will allow us to operate more cross-functionally and enable faster, more informed decision-making,&quot; the spokesperson added.<p>In other words:<p>We now have an Overseer role. Individual contributions no longer matter to management. Overseers will ensure the company&#x27;s decisions are followed through at every level of employment. Now even the design teams will &#x27;be on board&#x27; with the changes, or be gone.<p>No more dissent. No more questioning of the leadership. No more discussions.<p>The Overseer&#x27;s word is law, people!