Recently, Twitter has been in the headlines a lot. While a good part of that is due to new features coming out for the service, like Highlights and Moments. Twitter has also gone and gotten a new CEO, although he’s not really “new”. Twitter’s co-founder, Jack Dorsey is the new CEO, and has been for about a week now. Today, the company came out with a new restructuring plan, which involves laying off about 8% of their work force. That equates to about 336 members of the team. Sad to see anyone lose their job over circumstances that were not their own fault.
Twitter stated in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission:
“The restructuring is part of an overall plan to organize around the Company’s top product priorities and drive efficiencies throughout the Company. The Company intends to reinvest savings in its most important priorities to drive growth.”
Typically when we start seeing layoffs, that means that the company isn’t doing too well, and that they may close their doors or be sold soon. That is not the case here with Twitter. At least as far as we can tell. The company is just looking to re-organize parts of the team, and organize the company around top product priorities which is an important aspect of this whole thing. Restructuring is quite a normal thing when a company gets a new CEO, even if he was one of the co-founders of the company almost a decade ago. Twitter has been looking for ways to keep users engaged in their product, and gain even more users, as they’ve recently plateaued in the number of active users on the platform. With features like Moments and Highlights coming into play, that could really help get more users involved in Twitter.
At this point, Twitter isn’t going anywhere. What’s going to be interesting here though, is to see what Twitter does next. There’s already been a lot of changes, and there’s likely to be even more in the near future. Twitter wants to become your news source, and so far, they’ve done a great job at doing so.