Jack Dorsey is experiencing his first wave of executive departures since returning to Twitter as interim CEO earlier this month.
Dorsey lost three top product execs this week. On Tuesday, right after the company's earnings results were announced, news broke that Director of Product Management Todd Jackson and Head of Growth Christian Oestlien were on the way out.
And then, on Friday, Twitter confirmed to Re/Code that Trevor O'Brien, the product lead in charge of the company's apps, is also leaving.
These departures might simply be little shakers that come to nothing. Or they could be warning tremors foreshadowing a larger tectonic shift. Either way, a few picture frames are falling from the walls.
Dorsey hasn't hidden his dissatisfaction over Twitter's product efforts. Indeed, he's made abundantly clear his willingness to rethink the social media platform's fundamentals in order to grow its business.
"Product initiatives we'd mentioned in previous earnings calls, like Instant Timelines and Logged-Out experiences, have not yet had meaningful impact on growing our audience or participation," Dorsey said during Twitters earnings call earlier this week. "This is unacceptable, and we're not happy about it."
Both Oestlien and Jackson are headed to new jobs — Oestlien to YouTube and Jackson to Dropbox. There's no word yet on what O'Brien's plans are.
These moves clearly weren't orchestrated overnight. That said, the wheels do begin turning during times of uncertainty: That head hunter you turned down a few times all of a sudden gets a few minutes. One conversation turns into another. Then it's decision time.
With these departures, Dorsey could be losing some institutional knowledge that might come in handy he sets out to remake Twitter. But for someone who's said, "I want us to question everything to make it better," that may not be a bad thing.