Twitter’s heads of Growth, Product are gone

Just a few minutes into Twitter’s quarterly earnings report, we’ve already seen two major departures.

Todd Jackson, formerly Twitter’s director of product management, has left the company for Dropbox, where he will be the company’s first VP of product.

https://twitter.com/hunterwalk/status/626121079996551168

Jackson joined Twitter in 2014 when the company purchased his startup, Cover, which offered a “smart” lockscreen for Android smartphones.

Dropbox cofounders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi described Jackson in a blog post as “play[ing] critical roles in building communication and collaboration products that hundreds of millions of people use every day.”

Twitter’s former head of growth, Christian Oestlien, has also jumped ship — for YouTube.

https://twitter.com/christianism/status/626120332210892800

Oestlien was hired in September 2013 to kickstart the company’s overseas growth.

Twitter is undergoing massive changes as it tries to bring in more users — that means overhauling both the product and the growth departments. Earlier this year, Twitter unveiled its secret weapon: Project Lightning, a new feature that could make the platform more relevant to a broader range of users. Now the company is missing two major elements of this overhaul.