Another Member Of The Twitter Comms Team Leaves. So What's Going On At Twitter?
Twitter Communication exec Sean Garrett's departure from the company last week was a shock to many in the press who had the pleasure of dealing with him and the Twitter Communications Team.
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece follows up on Sean Garrett's departure announcement, which he made via tweets on November 8, 2011, and which caught the reporters who dealt with him off guard. TechCrunch's framing — 'another member' of the comms team leaving — treats the exit not as an isolated resignation but as part of a pattern worth probing.
The puzzle is timing rather than performance: weeks earlier, CEO Dick Costolo told the Web 2.0 Summit that Twitter had grown to 250 million tweets per day and that its iOS 5 integration had tripled signup rates, while November brought a run of product launches — new Activity and @USERNAME dashboard streams, Music Trends, and quiet 'Top News' and 'Top People' search features. A company shipping that aggressively losing its head of communications mid-stream is what makes the question land.
First-order effects
- Twitter enters a high-visibility stretch — the SOPA fight, where Facebook, eBay, Mozilla and AOL took public positions alongside it, plus a steady cadence of product rollouts — without a confirmed head of communications to lead press strategy.
- Reporters who relied on Garrett as their point of contact lose an established channel into the company, raising the cost of coverage precisely when Twitter's policy and product moves need explaining.
Second-order effects
- A vacant comms seat at one of the year's fastest-growing platforms puts pressure on Twitter to recruit from outside, likely pulling candidates from rival platforms and large web companies with comparable public-profile burdens.
- Every subsequent executive exit will now be read against this one, forcing Twitter to either explain a narrative or let the press supply one for it.
Third-order effects
- If departures cluster at hyper-growth consumer platforms, communications leadership becomes a structural pressure point — the role absorbs the friction between a company's scaling ambitions and its public accountability, making turnover there a leading indicator worth tracking.
- The episode feeds a broader rethinking of how startups manage external messaging: founder-and-a-few-hands comms models strain once a platform becomes infrastructure that regulators, media and activists engage daily.
The trend: As social platforms scale from startup to infrastructure, communications leadership turns into a high-churn seat whose vacancies become stories in themselves.