Twitter has named a new top product boss as part of a simplification of its management structure that organizes the company into functional groups.
Ed Ho, the former vice president of both product and engineering, has been on leave from Twitter since May. Under the new structure, his job will be split in two, with Kayvon Beykpour, the former CEO of Twitter’s live-streaming service Periscope, overseeing product.
Twitter’s top product job has been a revolving door — Beykpour is the sixth executive to have the position since early 2014.
Mike Montano, who has been at Twitter since 2011 and recently oversaw engineering for Twitter’s product team, will take over engineering for the company. Ho will stay on in a part-time role, focused on security.
Twitter had been organized around individual products. “We’re setting ourselves up for the future,” a spokesperson told Recode. “Simplifying how we manage will help us make faster decisions and be more creative and inventive in what we build for the people and businesses who use Twitter.”
CEO Jack Dorsey said the previous structure was designed to “drive a stronger, customer-focused approach and team dynamic.”
“A pure end-to-end functional organization (organized by discipline) will drive clearer decision-making, enable us to foster stronger culture, be more agile in making engineering trade-offs, and most importantly, sets us up for more creativity and invention, which is the phase we must now enter to continue to be relevant and important to the world,” he told employees in an email.
According to Variety, Beykpour’s new role is “just the latest step in an ascent” that started with Twitter’s acquisition of Periscope 2015. While Periscope was at first separated from Twitter’s professional video efforts, all of the company’s video initiatives were united under Beykpour’s leadership in early 2017.
“Having Beykpour in charge of all of Twitter’s product can also be seen as a vote of confidence for the company’s video initiatives,” Variety said.
