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Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

washingtonpost.com

11–20 of 89 posts

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#11
post #9
post #6

Contrast to Apple, which uses a fully functional model: https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio... I find this evolution fascinating. It makes sense to me that the GM model worked for so long. If much of a company'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…

Netflix isn’t quite a single product anymore. They have a huge studio/content arm who likely knows or cares very little about the streaming side - and there are several of them per continent. From a consumer perspective, it may come off as one company though.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#12
post #5

> The changes include moving to a "General Manager model" for teams in the product and technology organizations, which will mean having one person lead the work in those divisions. "This will allow us to operate more cross-functionally and enable faster, more informed decision-making," the spokesperson added. In other words: We now have an Overseer role. Individual contributions no longer matter to management. Overse…

As a sidenote, "This will allow us to operate more cross-functionally and enable faster, more informed decision-making," is just completely devoid of substance. Do the people crafting these corporate statements actually believe that people don’t see straight through them? Nobody is going to read this and think, “Oh, thank god, they’ve assured us that the change isn’t going to communication worse and decision-making l…

It's the emperors new clothes. Nobody wants the be the guy saying "But what the hell does that really mean?" so everyone pretends it means something.

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#13

> The changes include moving to a "General Manager model" for teams in the product and technology organizations, which will mean having one person lead the work in those divisions. "This will allow us to operate more cross-functionally and enable faster, more informed decision-making," the spokesperson added. In other words: We now have an Overseer role. Individual contributions no longer matter to management. Overse…

I’m genuinely confused how you arrived at that? I just read it as “there’s now one person in charge of each of these divisions”, which seems like a pretty standard way of organizing things? Do you have a specific reason you think this would shut down discussion?

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#14
post #8

I know little about how Twitter works, but it'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/perspective before changing anything major. It sort of implies a CEO decision coming from solely a CTO perspective.

I'm assuming that, as CTO, Parag had been in the room for all major company decisions for quite a while. I'm also guessing that the C-level conversations about this reorg had been happening for a while already, while Jack was there.

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#15
post #10
post #8

I know little about how Twitter works, but it'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/perspective before changing anything major. It sort of implies a CEO decision coming from solely a CTO perspective.

In the reality we have no idea how long this has been planned already. Another name just takes responsibility from that.

Exactly. I'm sure this has been discussed for months in the board. Maybe even was the reason he was appointed CEO.

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#16
post #8

I know little about how Twitter works, but it'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/perspective before changing anything major. It sort of implies a CEO decision coming from solely a CTO perspective.

IIRC from Dorsey's departure announcement, his successor has actually been at the company for a long time.

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#17

> The changes include moving to a "General Manager model" for teams in the product and technology organizations, which will mean having one person lead the work in those divisions. "This will allow us to operate more cross-functionally and enable faster, more informed decision-making," the spokesperson added. In other words: We now have an Overseer role. Individual contributions no longer matter to management. Overse…

If that is the case then I would actually encouraged by it, Twitter social activist employee's are a problem for the platform.

sadly though I dont believe this will be the case,

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#18
post #15
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the reality we have no idea how long this has been planned already. Another name just takes responsibility from that.

Exactly. I'm sure this has been discussed for months in the board. Maybe even was the reason he was appointed CEO.

Or perhaps an opportune time to make a change like this.

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#19
Boy is for-profit operation a downer. We get so much from Twitter, but of course, that doesn't make enough money, so the march towards locking it down into a closed pipeline of corporate marketing/ads/curation/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/paid tweets injected into my feed will likely go away, etc.

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#20
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' 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).

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't performing and are causing problems for other projects but the VP just shrugged and basically said "there is nothing we can do". 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.

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