Jack Dorsey Cleaning House At Twitter: 4 Key Product Guys Are Out
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It's so pathetic that a company as successful as Twitter needs to settle for a part-time effort from Jack Dorsey rather than a dedicated person in their most important position.
Edit: actually, goddamn. TC says G offered up to $150MM. [1] That's generational wealth. From the article: "Google may have paid as much as $150 million in stock grants to retain key product employees Sundar Pichai and Neal Mohan, say multiple sources."
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/06/google-said-to-have-high-le...
Not sure what this has to do with Twitter.
Go on and tweet "iPhone" or "iPad." Often you'll get a couple spam tweets within a minute. Almost guaranteed within a couple hours.
It will be independent startups and amateur dilettantes are going to discover these technologies, because their financial interests are most aligned. So I suspect the internet marketers are going to be the ones to profit. Of course spamming is short sighted... the smart ones have yet to reveal their strategies.
Find the influential nodes on the network; cater to their interests; profit. Figure out who influences the influencers; cater to their interests; profit. Bubble all the way down. Trace the inner circles of influence until you can find cost-effective points of entry.
If anyone else is thinking similarly please get in touch...there's got to be some linear algebra to collapse this into an effective system. Or maybe it's a non-linear system. Dunno. I got to study up on Neural Networks; I prepaid my tutor for a session.
Pretty easy to identify a lot of spammers, there is a clear pattern if you watch any trending topics.
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/07/twitter-int...
I have the idea that product managers are often what I the other day heard being called 'intrapreneurs' - people with an internal motivation to create (like entrepreneurs) but who like the things that a larger organization can provide them and that they wouldn't have if they were on their own (secretaries, proper testing team, specialized roles for various tasks etc.).
Identifying and brainstorming new products, talking with users and potential users, figuring out if the product makes financial sense, writing up requirements (with widely varying levels of detail), working with developers to ensure the product being built matches the requirements, keeping people across the company informed about the product's status with the appropriate level of detail, describing the product to and then training sales, coming up with longer-term plans (the 'product roadmap'), creating marketing materials for the product, chatting with the media about the product -- I've done all of those things as a product manager at a variety of places.
Product managers become useful when a company grows, people specialize their functions somewhat, and everyone no longer knows everything about what everyone else is doing. Good product managers do their best to eliminate surprises.
It's the sort of job where you learn by doing, and in my experience there's a lot of terrible product managers out there.
Fun Rationalizations:
- New Twitter was an awful decision and represented poor judgment. Better product intuition will lead to more usage of the Twitter platform. If you wish to refute this then you must cite relative statistics of social engagement that are better proxies than growth and uniques: one challenge I invite is for someone in the know to contrast Time on Site for Facebook & clients vs. Time on Site for Twitter & clients (vs. potential engagement on Twitter platform).
- An ally of your enemy is not your friend. This move will create cultural stability and reduce confusion.
- Jack has the potential to create an incredible alliance between Twitter and Square, ushering in the new payment protocol, ready to fully embrace a technology like Bitcoin when the moment becomes appropriate.
- Twitter has potential to be the ultimate payment protocol platform because it maps exactly relations between leaders and followers. Money is a metric of social value; so is the leader/follower dichotomy ("Following" people on Twitter, ReTweeting to signal alliance [the same function as laughing], etc. [I don't really know what I'm talking about.]).
What's the point you say good man? I tell you now, Dorsey is like Val Kilmer in Top Gun - "that's how he flies, no mistakes." Dorsey just wears us all down and grinds our resistance to a nub with whatever he touches. He is so exacting and precise that what he does now will be seen but not completely understood for years - the world is his canvas.
I only pray he use his powers for good and resist the darker side of his heart - for if he didn't we may all continue to fill little synthetic leather contraptions with green papers, receipts and faceless business cards for years to come.
Have they even found a theoretical revenue model that can match the speed in which they burn through capital?