Exclusive: Twitter's Director Of Search Is Out As Product Is Restructured
In July of last year, Twitter Search usage was exploding. As such, Twitter hired a new high-profile engineer, Doug Cook, to take over as the new “Director of Search.” Cook has now left the company, we've learned.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter created the Director of Search role in July 2009 and filled it with a high-profile engineer, Doug Cook, precisely because search usage was exploding; barely ten months later, Cook is out and the search product itself is being restructured. A role built around a usage spike has already outlived its first occupant.
Timing gives the exit more weight than a single departure usually carries: in April 2010 Twitter declared its intent to identify places based on the coordinates of geo-coded tweets, part of a confirmed land rush into location that also includes Google, Foursquare and Gowalla. Search is being reorganized at the exact moment the company's discovery ambitions are expanding beyond plain keyword lookup.
First-order effects
- Twitter's search team is left without the named director hired to lead it, in the middle of a restructure of the very product he was brought in to run.
Second-order effects
- With Twitter building place identification from geo-coded tweets, the vacant search seat forces an internal decision about whether search remains a standalone product line or folds into the broader real-time and location discovery effort competing with Google, Foursquare and Gowalla.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — senior hires brought in during usage surges departing before their mandates mature — Twitter's product organization will be shaped less by individual appointments than by how often the structure around those roles gets rebuilt.
The trend: At fast-scaling real-time platforms, search leadership is becoming a revolving seat: roles engineered for usage spikes get restructured once the surrounding product strategy shifts toward broader discovery.