Former CEO of Twitter’s live-streaming service called Periscope and the current GM of video for the company, Kayvon Beykpour, is now taking the mantle as the top product boss of Twitter in accordance with an executive shuffle that was announced within the company.
Whereas the former VP of product and engineering together, Ed Ho has been on leave from the company since the month of May, and now, he is stepping down from his double role and is taking a part-time role to help with Twitter’s safety and abuse efforts. Twitter is dividing his job into two: Beykpour will oversee product, and Mike Montano, who has been an executive at Twitter since 2011 and oversaw engineering of recent for the company’s product team will now oversee engineering for the company.
The history of Twitter’s top product job is not something to forget so easily. Kayvon Beykpour happen to be the sixth executive to head Twitter’s product division since the beginning of 2014.
The rate of turnover has been so high that Vanity Fair once referred to the job as “cursed”. The job was also at one time associated the job to the famed Defence Against the Dark Arts professorship in “Harry Potter” that brought a different teacher to the role in each year.
The only reason the turnover carries any importance at Twitter is when it disrupts the product plans and vision of the company. History has shown that Twitter has suffered from a lack of executive continuity, leaders and ideas are always going in and out of the company is making it difficult to effectively do anything. At Facebook, the head of top product has been Chris Cox for more than 12 years now.
A spokesperson at Twitter informed our sources about the changes saying, “We’re setting ourselves up for the future. 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.”
