But I am never going to optimize short-term revenue at the expense of user experience or long-term goals. If people think we are going about this too cautiously, they can think that and I don’t care.
- Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO, cited by Michael Copeland via Wired
love @dickc’s clarity about what’s important
(via bijan)
Apparently, Jack Dorsey’s 8 hours per day at Twitter (and 8 hours a day at Square) have led to some conflict over operations with Dick Costolo, which is manifesting itself in the turnover in marketing staff:
Alexia Tsotsis via Techcrunch
[…] according to multiple sources, the departure of Marketing head Pam Kramer six weeks ago has resulted in Twitter’s Jack Dorsey basically replacing her as head of Marketing and amping up his influence within the company. (Yes he really does work those 8 hours at Twitter, now all I’ve got to do is confirm the 8 hours with Square).
Dorsey stepping it up, coupled with Dick Costolo’s heavy Operations hand has led to a conflict in many staff members eyes, “Which master do we follow?” And confusion.
According to one source, this “Do I do what Dick says or do I do what Jack says?” dilemma has put extra special strain on the Twitter Communications team, which seemingly doesn’t know whose message they should be communicating. Others say that its Jack’s Jobsian management approach that has led to the frustration among staff in all departments.
First, I don’t know why Costolo and the Twitter board allows Dorsey to be the CEO of Square while running product for Twitter. It doesn’t make sense.
Second, I’m not so sure that Twitter’s marketing team was/is as shiny as Tsotsis and others have colored it. The company has made a lot of missteps, and while its hard to separate policy from positioning, I wouldn’t hold them up as paragons.
Lastly, what message is Twitter sending these days, anyway? ‘Follow Your Interests’? That’s some great positioning? ‘The information network’ story is weak.
My two cents: they should better articulate the value proposition of being connected in a connected age rather than making a weak case for following our interests.
Maybe there is a battle over positioning and message going on, and the marketing folks most associated with this weak sauce are being shown the door.
Two on this list of Google APIs that are ‘deprecated’ — meaning that they will be shut off in the not-too-distant-future — caught my eye: Feedburner API and Wave API.
Wave has proven to be such a one-eyed goat that Google announced its shutdown back in December 2010.
But this series of events in the history of Feedburner is the sort of thing that makes me scratch my head (via Wikipedia):
On June 3, 2007, FeedBurner was acquired by Google Inc., for a rumored price of $100 million.[7] One month later, two of their popular “PRO” services (MyBrand and TotalStats) were made free to all users.[8]
On August 15, 2008, Google completed migration of FeedBurner into its group of services.[citation needed] Publishers who have completed migration will access FeedBurner via feedburner.google.com.
On May 26, 2011, Google announced that the FeedBurner APIs would be deprecated, leaving the long-term availability of an API for FeedBurner uncertain.[9]
Perhaps there’s no better example of how quickly we have caromed past a social web based on RSS to one based on streams. And there’s Dick Costolo, a founder of Feedburner and now CEO of Twitter, the canary in the coal mine.
(via Chartier)
In the middle of an almost over the top boosterish rah rah piece about the undervaluation of Twitter relative to Facebook, the authors hit on the mess than Twitter has made with third-party developers:
Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin, Why Twitter Is Massively Undervalued Compared To Facebook
Embrace third-party developers.
Unfortunately, Twitter has lost its way with developers
. Six months ago it was a critical piece of infrastructure that everyone wanted to use as the messaging layer for their applications. Now Twitter has turned its back on third party developers because the company thinks it is necessary to own the major clients (web, iPhone, Android, iPad). Hopefully the elevation of Feedburner’s Dick Costolo to CEO signals a shift back to the correct strategy: Don’t monetize the client, monetize the feed.
Here are three things Twitter could immediately do to mend fences with developers in a way that’s also good for the company:
- Embed ads
- Make the client attribution
- Open the graph API
These moves would not hurt Twitter at all, and in fact would kickstart their platform efforts versus Facebook Connect. And they’re very much compatible with promoted tweets, promoted accounts, and promoted trends—and the accompanying tools
Costolo might be very business-like, but we’ll have to see if Twitter’s management team is going to turn the developer community around. It’s clear that Twitter is increasingly going to be about the UX — witness the push for the New Twitter — because that’s where commerce is going to happen. They may be open to integration away from the UX — like analysis, and data mining — but Twitter is going to become the point of contact for Twitter users.
Ev Williams has stepped down as Twitter CEO to spend more time focused on product strategy.
I am most satisfied while pushing product direction. Building things is my passion, and I’ve never been more excited or optimistic about what we have to build.
This is why I have decided to ask our COO, Dick Costolo, to become Twitter’s CEO. Starting today, I’ll be completely focused on product strategy.
When I insisted on bringing Dick into the COO role a year ago, I got a lot of questions from my board. But I knew Dick would be a strong complement to me, and this has proven to be the case. During his year at Twitter, he has been a critical leader in devising and executing our revenue efforts, while simultaneously and effectively making the trains run on time in the office.
This reminds me of the recent interview with Paul Maritz conducted by Adam Bryant, where Maritz underscores how the job of a leader changes as groups grow in size:
As you manage bigger groups of people, you cannot be as closely connected to specific underlying issues and challenges. Your contribution has to become more of making sure that you’re getting the best out of others, that others are really thinking the issues through, and that you’re creating the broad framework in which they can get their jobs done and be as productive and focused as they can be. What makes it a challenge is that every time you cross one of those boundaries, you become less of a specialist, less knowledgeable about specific issues.
You have to realize that your contribution becomes more symbolic, in the sense that you’re trying to set a general direction. People want to see you as representing the general mission, not just yourself.
And, as the groups get bigger, the period over which you measure your own performance gets longer, and the way you get your feedback changes. The bigger the group, the easier it is to spend days wondering whether you had any impact at all. You really have to take a longer-term view. So you’re going to have to discipline yourself and take a step back to ask yourself the question, “Are we moving in the right fundamental direction?” And, if so, take satisfaction from that.
My hunch is that Ev was getting less enjoyment from that ‘symbolic’ sense of reward from work increasingly less connected to the product.
Also, in Costolo he has a manager with real experience ramping up large organizations. As Baritz points out in the same interview, there are four types in a great leadership team:
You need to have somebody who is a strategist or visionary, who sets the goals for where the organization needs to go.
You need to have somebody who is the classic manager — somebody who takes care of the organization, in terms of making sure that everybody knows what they need to do and making sure that tasks are broken up into manageable actions and how they’re going to be measured.
You need a champion for the customer, because you are trying to translate your product into something that customers are going to pay for. So it’s important to have somebody who empathizes and understands how customers will see it. I’ve seen many endeavors fail because people weren’t able to connect the strategy to the way the customers would see the issue.
Then, lastly, you need the enforcer. You need somebody who says: “We’ve stared at this issue long enough. We’re not going to stare at it anymore. We’re going to do something about it. We’re going to make a decision. We’re going to deal with whatever conflict we have.”
You very rarely find more than two of those personalities in one person. I’ve never seen it. And really great teams are where you have a group of people who provide those functions and who respect each other and, equally importantly, both know who they are and who they are not. Often, I’ve seen people get into trouble when they think they’re the strategist and they’re not, or they think they’re the decision maker and they’re not.
From this perspective it’s clear that Ev is a product visionary, while Costolo is the ‘classic manager’: a business man. But Ev might have opted to be a Jobs-type visionary, and built his team around him to match his skills.
I guess that there is a hidden deal in here: Costolo took the COO job under the condition that if he was able to settle things down at Twitter — to make the trains run on time — then he would get the CEO job, and Ev would step aside into a Chairman/Product Visionary role. Now that Twitter has started to become more focused on money, and less obsessed with building an ecosystem, this lines up.
I bet the investors will sleep better tonight.
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
My work is social tools and their impact on media, business, and society.
I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections.
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