Twitter Fires Product Team

Four key product managers at Twitter are getting the ax, TechCrunch's MG Siegler reports. They are Kevin Cheng, Josh Elman, Anamitra Banerji and Jean-Paul Cozzatti.

This sounds like a pretty big shake-up, and it probably is, and it's also completely normal. Jack Dorsey just returned to Twitter as the company's executive chairman and product visionary. Those people are part of the Ev Williams/Jason Goldman team.

Whenever a new leader steps in an organization, they usually replace the previous person's lieutenants with their own. It's not an ego thing: it's just that everyone is more comfortable working with a certain type of person, and so when you step in to run an organization, that's the people you want around you. And Dorsey is a visionary and very demanding product leader, often compared to Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple people were terrified to get in an elevator with him because they feared they wouldn't have a job by the time the doors opened again. 

Don't Miss: Twitter's Next Huge Business →

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See Also:

• Because "Google" Is So Hard To Type, Now There's G.co
• THE GOOGLE INVESTOR: Google Seen As The Leading Social Media Stock
• The Truth About How Much 4 Million Twitter Followers Are Worth

Twitter Fires Product Team

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Product Extension Ads and Product Local Ads Now Available on Mobile Devices

Google's recent Smartphone User Study found that 79% of smartphone consumers use their phones to help with shopping activities. To help advertisers meet these key mobile shopper needs, Google today introduced two desktop ad formats to the mobile platform: Product Extension Ads and Product Local Ads.

Product Extension Ads and Product Local Ads Now Available on Mobile Devices

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Hey @Jack, Here's An Easy Product Fix For You To Start With

Jack Dorsey, the inventor of Twitter, is back at the company focusing on product, and has ambitious goals like making the service easier to understand and use for normal people, which is great.

But Dorsey is nothing if not a detail-oriented product visionary, so here's a small product detail that he should pay attention to and fix. It's not much, but it's really annoying and a poor user experience -- exactly the kind of thing we imagine Dorsey won't tolerate.

It's a bit tricky to explain, but bear with us.

Twitter's official iPhone app lets you email tweets. I use that feature very often, because I often email myself links that look interesting. So far so good.

The problem, however, comes from the way Twitter now shortens URL. On Twitter's apps, its official URL shortener t.co doesn't display URLs as http://t.co/XYZ but as the original URL, shortened. So a link to http://www.businessinsider.com/clusterstock might look like this: businessinsider.com/clust... Again, good: instead of an undecipherable bit.ly link, you can have at least an idea of where you're being pointed to.

Here's where it goes wrong: when you email a Twitter-shortened link, the link in the email points to the shortened version and not the actual URL.

For example, this morning we emailed ourselves a tweet to a blog post by Twitter investor Bijan Sabet, and here's what it looks like in our inbox:

The URL to Sabet's post is http://bijansabet.com/post/4220407806/sensitive-vcs-or-something-else. If you click on the link from inside Twitter's app, the shortened link takes you there. But the link in the email takes you to http://bijansabet.com/post/422040780 which is a page that doesn't exist.

See? It's not a huge deal, but it's annoying when it happens and it would be pretty easy to fix. The reason why this happens is because the "email tweet" feature in the iPhone app was implemented before Twitter's new URL shortener, and (I assume) because Twitter employees don't email tweets.

It's the kind of small mistake that tends to slip by when you have an unfocused product organization without strong direction, which seems to have been the case with Twitter for a while. And while things like this aren't a big deal, if there's enough they can add up to an overall user experience that turns off people, especially the non tech savvy normal people Twitter so covets.

Don't Miss: How Twitter Got Desperate Enough To Hire Two Part-Timers To Lead Product →

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See Also:

• Here's What Jack Dorsey Needs To Do To Make Twitter Awesome Again
• StockTwits Snags Yahoo Finance Vet As VP Of Product
• CHART OF THE DAY: Apple's Developer Conference Is The Hottest Ticket In Town

Hey @Jack, Here's An Easy Product Fix For You To Start With

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How Twitter Got Desperate Enough To Hire Two Part-Timers To Lead Product

Twitter's new executive chairman and product leader, Jack Dorsey, is also the fulltime CEO of another startup, Square.

Twitter's new director of product management, Satya Patel, will also be splitting his professional time with another concern – Battery Ventures, where he'll continue working as an advisor to portfolio companies.

Is Twitter really in such desperate shape that it's willing to hire product leaders who want to maintain other jobs?

In a word: Yes.

Here's an anecdote to illustrate how badly things are messed up over there right now.

Remember that whole "#Dickbar" controversy, where Twitter updated its iPhone app so that a "QuickBar" showing Twitter trends and ads would show up in every users Twitter stream?

People hated it.

They hated it for two reasons – one less fair than the other.

The unfair reason: the QuickBar put ads in the Twitter stream. That's unfair because you had to know ads were coming.

The fair reason: the QuickBar put Twitter's useless, crass, and irrelevant "trends" in every user's face. 

Instapaper creator and UI genius Marco Arment hit this complaint hard, writing, "It’s a news ticker limited to one-word items, lacking any context, broadcasting mostly topics that I don’t understand, recognize, or care about. It’s nonsensical. At worst, it can offend. At best, it will confuse."

Anyway, the #DickBar was not good. But that's not the point. Even companies with good product teams launch sucky products sometimes.

The fact that indicates Twitter's whole product process is in bad shape is this: A source briefed on the ordeal tells us that the QuickBar was launched, essentially out of the blue, by a junior product manager – without any review from the company's senior leadership. Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO and #DickBar namesake, is said to have been livid after the ensuing controversy.

Whoops.

How did #DickBar happen?

Apparently, Twitter has a very horizontal org-structure. The reason Twitter has such a structure, say observers, is because "that's the way Facebook does it."

Of course, what Facebook has and Twitter does not, is Mark Zuckerberg – a senior executive and product visionary who is comfortable getting elbow deep in product development. In fact, after Ev Williams stepped down as Twitter CEO last fall – and his top product lieutenant, Jason Goldman, followed suit – Twitter had almost zero product leadership at all.

The good news is that, in Jack Dorsey and Satya Patel, Twitter now has that kind of leadership.

The bad news is that it has it on a part-time basis.

We reached out to Twitter to discuss this story but we never heard back.

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See Also:

• Twitter In Negotiations To Bring Jack Dorsey Back As Chief Product Officer
• HERE IT IS: Jack Dorsey's Three-Part Plan To Fix Twitter
• LOOMING DISASTER: Jack Dorsey's Return To Twitter -- The SAIcast

How Twitter Got Desperate Enough To Hire Two Part-Timers To Lead Product

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Marissa Mayer's Favorite Non-Google Product (GOOG)

It's her Omega watch.

That's what Mayer told the audience in a Q&A session at the SXSW conference.

The watch is an Omega De Ville with an 18-karat gold face and stainless steel band, and she bought it in Zurich in 2002, according to a 2009 Vogue profile. At SXSW, she told the audience she got the watch as an intern, and the numbers are laid out in a way that appeals to her design sensibilities.

Mayer was on hand to talk about the future of location-based applications, particularly mobile local apps. During the talk, she shared some interesting stats about Google's mobile business:

• Google Maps has 150 million mobile users, which make up 40% of its total.

• Users have submitted 3 million ratings to Hotpot, the location-based recommendation service Google launched last year.

• The turn-by-turn directions feature in  Google Maps Navigation processes more than 35 million miles of driving instructions per day.

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Marissa Mayer's Favorite Non-Google Product (GOOG)

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