Twitter’s New CEO Emphasizes He Wants The Company To Move Faster

Twitter’s new CEO, Parag Agrawal, in his first public interview has passed a very clear message, which is for the world to expect the social network to move a lot faster than it has in recent times.

Since taking over at Twitter from co-founder Jack Dorsey, Agrawal is reportedly having his first public appearance. In the interview, he says that his top priority is to “improve our execution” and streamline how the microblogging social platform operates. According to the verge his comments, made at the Barclays technology conference, come after activist investor Elliott Management shook up Twitter’s board of directors last year and pressured Dorsey to step down from his part-time CEO role. Dorsey remains the CEO of Block (formerly called Square).

Despite being Twitter’s CEO for a very short period of say about 9-days now, Agrawal has already made significant changes to its upper ranks. Reports say since taking over changes have occurred as he has put in efforts at reorganizing the company under the key pillars of Consumer, Revenue, and Core Tech, with a general manager heading each division. “I believe we have set them up so they can really move fast,” says Agrawal. As part of the change which has occurred in the 9-days of his assumption of office of CEO, 2 executives who previously reported to Dorsey —Michael Montano and Dantley Davis, are planning to leave at the end of the year.

According to the new Twitter CEO, “We were operating previously in a functional structure where we had a single engineering organization, a single design research organization, and product teams that were matrixed into them.” Implying that the previously functional structure contributed to a slowdown of the company. Other changes that have occurred within a short period are the three new general managers — are Kayvon Beykpour, Bruce Falck, and Nick Caldwell. Lindsey Iannucci was named VP of Operations. “She’s going to help us improve our operational rigor in this new structure to really get us to faster decision making, clearer ownership, and increased accountability, improved operations, which will result in faster execution overall and better results,” says Agrawal.

Throughout the 30-minute of his first interview, the reoccurring theme was his focus on speed and taking the company in that direction. Agrawal discusses his previous role as Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer, and how his constant focus was on rebuilding the company’s aged tradition of the technical stack, and how he wanted products could be shipped faster. The new CEO admitted to the company’s “slow decision making because of so much coordination that needed to happen” between teams to get changes out the door. His responses at the interview in a way kind of suggested his direct acknowledgment that Twitter never really delighted investors by surpassed expectations since going public and that the company hasn’t quite addressed shifts in user behavior that have occurred over the years.

When questioned about Twitter’s just-announced acquisition of the Quill messaging app, Agrawal called direct messages “a key product bet,” a refreshing sentiment was given that DMs have been woefully underdeveloped for so long. “The opportunity around direct messages is really key,” he said, adding that “it’s a way to connect with anyone in the world and expect to hear back from them.”