New Twitter CEO shakes up staff

Davis, previously a director of product design at Facebook, joined Twitter in 2019 to lead its design team. He is Black and Asian, and was the first Black executive at Twitter to report directly to the CEO.

Twitter’s new chief executive officer, Parag Agrawal, announced a major reorganization of the company Friday, putting his stamp on the organization after the sudden departure of co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey earlier this week.

The shake- up, meant to streamline the company’s operations and accelerate its growth, will bring together employees previously divided by job function — such as engineering, design, and product development — on teams organized by what they’re working on, such as consumer product, revenue, and core technology.

Two executives, head of engineering Michael Montano and chief design officer Dantley Davis, will step down as part of the reshuffling and leave the company by year’s end, as will the company’s head of people, Jennifer Christie.

In a companywide email obtained by The Washington Post, Agrawal said that he will focus on “clear decision-making, increased accountability, and faster execution,” and said he was “making a number of organizational and leadership changes to best position us to achieve our goals… . We’ve all discussed the critical need for more operational rigor and it must start from the top.”

Twitter subsequently confirmed the moves, and it reported them to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in a filing.

The reorganization is the first clear sign that Twitter’s new leader intends to overhaul a culture that has been considered slow to innovate and mired in internal conflict. Dorsey, who announced his resignation from Twitter unexpectedly on Monday, was viewed by many as a hands-off leader.

He had faced pressure to resign from investors and was criticized, along with the leaders of other social media companies, for failing to control the spread of misinformation and other harmful content.

Agrawal, 37, was chosen unanimously to succeed Dorsey by Twitter’s board of directors, according to an official statement Monday.

At Tuesday’s all- hands meeting, according to employees who attended, Dorsey emphasized Agrawal’s engineering background and the fact that he rose through the ranks over a decade at Twitter in touting him as the ideal choice to lead the influential social media firm. He is tasked with making Twitter a faster-paced company but will also face intense scrutiny from lawmakers intent on regulating social media.

Davis, previously a director of product design at Facebook, joined Twitter in 2019 to lead its design team. He is Black and Asian, and was the first Black executive at Twitter to report directly to the CEO.

The company had touted him as a hard-charging leader who would detoxify the platform, but he was also criticized by some employees for what they said was a blunt, aggressive management style.

Montano, the company’s head of engineering, was a longtime company veteran and was known as a champion of giving employees flexibility and enabling remote work, which Twitter had embraced early on.