Twitter shakeup sees departure of top execs - CNET

Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey announced the departure of multiple department heads on Sunday, marking the biggest management shakeup since he retued to run the social network in mid-2015.

Leaving the company are head of media Katie Jacobs Stanton, product chief Kevin Weil, engineering chief Alex Roetter and human resources leader Brian "Skip" Schipper, Dorsey said in a note posted on Twitter. It's the latest move in a series of steps Dorsey is taking to overhaul the ailing company, which is struggling to prove its worth to investors. Its stock has fallen nearly 50 percent since Dorsey took over.

Twitter's success hinges on increasing the number of people who use it and proving it appeals to a mainstream audience the way other social networks such as Facebook and the fast-growing Instagram do. Facebook now boasts more than 1.2 billion monthly users and Instagram has 400 million users, but Twitter lags behind with 316 million monthly users (as of July 2015) despite being four years older than the picture-sharing service.

Twitter users are usually staunch advocates of the the social network, but tend to resent changes that are brought in, such as the recent switch from "favoriting" tweets to "liking" them. To grow Twitter, change is inevitable, but Dorsey has to walk the fine line between keeping the current userbase on board and simultaneously introducing new features that will make it appeal to non-users.

Under the leadership of former CEO Dick Costolo, the platform failed to evolve and draw in these new users. Dorsey is attempting to change this with faster innovation -- such as the promise of finding a way to extend tweets beyond the 140-character limit to 10,000 characters and Moments, a company-curated list of the best content on Twitter.