After Just Six Months On The Job, Twitter's Head Of Product Is Demoted

Twitter is going through executive change, yet again.

Just six months after CEO Dick Costolo hired Daniel Graf to be in charge of Twitter's consumer products, Twitter is demoting Graf. Kevin Weil will be in charge of consumer products.

A person familiar with Twitter's thinking said the reason for the change is that Twitter wants to execute quicker.

This person said Weil has been at the company for five years, working his way up from the mid levels of the company, so he knows the inner workings of Twitter. He knows the head of engineering, so he should be able to get product changes out the door faster.

Weil was head of revenue products. He oversaw the roll out of Twitter's ad products, which didn't exist when he started. He will still oversee revenue in addition to consumer.

Of course, Weil's promotion begs the following question: Why didn't he get this job six months ago when Graf was hired? Our source didn't have an answer to that question.

In July, we interviewed CEO Dick Costolo. We asked him about Daniel Graf. At the time he said, "One of the reasons we brought Daniel in is he's very entrepreneurial. In fact, he's started his own company and ran his own company before."

Twitter wanted outsiders to fill in some skill it feels like it was lacking. But, obviously that wasn't working.

This shake up follows yesterday's news that Twitter engineering VP Jeremy Gordon is leaving. Engineering and product are separate groups, so the changes are unrelated.

But, it looks bad for Twitter. It's more turmoil for a company that's been defined by executive turmoil.

This year alone, Twitter has lost COO Ali Rowghani, its head of news Vivian Schiller, and head of media Chole Sladden, just to name a few.

All this change led to Brian O'Malley at Brian at venture capital firm Accel Partners saying the following about Costolo in August, "If someone's gotten divorced once, you really don't know who's to blame ... But if someone's gotten divorced five times, there may be a pattern there."

From Twitter's perspective, it knows this doesn't look good. But, it's making changes it believes are best for the company.