Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company 

adam-messinger

Adam Messinger, Twitter’s chief technology officer, said in a Twitter message on Tuesday that he was leaving the company. His departure follows that of Adam Bain, Twitter’s chief operating officer, who exited last month. Other top product, engineering and media team leaders have also departed the company this year.

“After 5 years I’ve decided to leave Twitter and take some time off,” Mr. Messinger said in the post.

His exit once again raises questions about the stability of Twitter’s executive bench. The social media company has been struggling to attract more users to its 140-character message service while trying to figure out how to improve revenue growth. In recent months, Twitter flirted with selling itself to suitors like Salesforce.com, but discussions ended with no resolution. The company has since been in cost-cutting mode, reducing its staff and shedding some of its businesses.

One of the biggest blows to Twitter was the loss of Mr. Bain, who was an unofficial internal mascot beloved by many employees for his cheerful demeanor and his cheerleading of the company. Anthony Noto, who was Twitter’s chief financial officer, took over the chief operating officer position, and the company is now searching for a new C.F.O.

Mr. Messinger was not the only executive to leave Twitter on Tuesday. Josh McFarland, a vice president of product, said he was departing to join the venture-capital firm Greylock Partners. Mr. McFarland, who oversaw much of advertising product development, had joined Twitter in April 2015 when Twitter acquired his company, the digital advertising platform TellApart, for about $500 million. Mr. McFarland was a rising star at Twitter; he was respected for being decisive and willing to have hard conversations, former Twitter employees said.

Mr. Messinger joined Twitter in 2011 from the software company Oracle. He began as a vice president working on engineering infrastructure and later moved to a position overseeing application development. He became chief technology officer in 2013.

Over the past year, Mr. Messinger had been awarded more responsibilities by Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive. After some executive reshuffling, Mr. Messinger gained oversight of the engineering organization, as well as product development and design. He helped decide on Twitter’s new product leader, Keith Coleman, a former Google employee who had worked on that company’s Gmail and chat apps.

Mr. Messinger was awarded 1.25 million restricted stock units for his additional duties. After his departure, Twitter’s heads of product, design and engineering will report directly to Mr. Dorsey. Edward Ho, a vice president of engineering, will take over Mr. Messinger’s engineering duties as general manager reporting to Mr. Dorsey.

“I’ll be working even closer with our engineering and design teams to ensure we continue to be the fastest and best service to show what’s happening in the world,” Mr. Dorsey said in a statement.

Mr. Messinger’s supporters at Twitter lauded what they described as his cerebral approach, but he also had detractors who said he was indecisive and sometimes did not take enough concrete steps to make changes happen, according to three former Twitter employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the interactions were private.

Mr. Messinger did not say what he would do after leaving Twitter. A person with knowledge of Mr. Messinger’s plans, who asked to remain anonymous because the person was not authorized to speak publicly, said Mr. Messinger did not plan to head to a competing social network like Facebook or Snapchat.

Source: New York Times

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