Anthony Quintano for Re/code
Twitter has demoted VP of Product Daniel Graf, the former Google Maps lead that the company hired in April to head its consumer product teams, according to people familiar with the situation.
Twitter VP Kevin Weil has been promoted to VP of product in Graf’s place, and will oversee all of Twitter’s product moving forward. Weil, who was previously Twitter’s VP of revenue products, has been at the company since 2009. The shuffle was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Graf, who will now report to Weil and previously reported to CEO Dick Costolo, joined Twitter in April after managing Google Maps at the search giant. Part of the reason for the change is that Twitter’s product division under Graf wasn’t moving fast enough for Costolo, according to people familiar with the matter. (Costolo mentioned a desire to move faster on Monday’s earnings call with investors.)
One inside source told Re/code that Graf’s internal presentations lacked conviction and that he hadn’t shipped any products since taking over the role. We’ve reached out to Graf and will update if and when we hear from him.
Graf will now focus primarily on geo-location products at Twitter, according to these people. Twitter currently allows users to add locations to a tweet, but there are other location-specific features the company could build. For example, Twitter could show users tweets from a specific area, or surface an ad based on businesses nearby.
Executive changes at Twitter are commonplace with Costolo handling most of the shuffling. Costolo has replaced his CFO, fired his COO, and replaced VPs of media, engineering and product — all in the past six months.
Depressing & annoying how regularly you hear leaders (sports, biz, govt) say “I wasn’t involved in that” “I don’t make those decisions” etc.
— dick costolo (@dickc) October 28, 2014
The leash is particularly short when it comes to the Twitter product. Weil will be the third product VP at the company this year alone, with Michael Sippey having left in January. Twitter COO Ali Rowghani was also ousted earlier this year when he was unable to deliver the kind of user growth the company expected. It was Rowghani who hired Graf.
Thursday’s news comes just one day after two other Twitter execs announced they were leaving the company, including head of product engineering Jeremy Gordon.
