The new CEO of Twitter wants the company to move much faster

Parag Agrawal, the new CEO of Twitter, has a clear message: Expect the social network to move much faster than in the past.

Since he took over Twitter, in his first public appearance from co-founder Jack Dorsey, Agrawal says his top priority is to "improve our execution" and simplify the operation of Twitter. His comments, made at the Barclays technology conference, come after activist investor Elliott Management shook Twitter's board of directors last year and pressured Dorsey to step down from his part-time CEO position. Dorsey is still the CEO of Block (formally called Square).

Despite being the CEO of Twitter for just nine days, Agrawal has already made big changes to his top ranks. Last Friday, he reorganized the company under the key pillars of Consumer, Revenue and Core Technology, with a CEO in charge of each division. "I think we've set them up so they can really move fast," he says now. As part of the change, two executives who earlier reported to Dorsey, engineering leader Michael Montano and Dantley Davis, the head of design and research, plan to leave at the end of December.

According to Agrawal, "We were operating previously in a functional structure where we had a single engineering organization, a single design research organization, and product teams that were matrixed into them," Agrawal says, implying that the setup slowed the company down. Along with the three new general managers — who are Kayvon Beykpour, Bruce Falck, and Nick Caldwell — Lindsey Iannucci was named VP of Operations. "She's going to help us improve our operational rigour in this new structure to really get us to faster decision making, clearer ownership, increased accountability, improved operations, which will result in faster execution overall and better results."

His focus on speed was a running theme throughout the roughly 30-minute interview. He further explained how, in his previous role as CTO, he focused on rebuilding the company's ageing technical stack so products could be shipped faster. He admitted that there has been "slow decision making due to the huge amount of coordination that had to happen" between teams for changes to go out the door. His comments amounted to a direct acknowledgement that Twitter has not lived up to investors' expectations since it went public and the company has been slow to address changes in user behaviour over the years.

When queried about Twitter's just-announced acquisition of the Quill messaging app, Agrawal called direct messages "a key product gamble," a refreshing sentiment given that DMs have been woefully underdeveloped for so long. "The opportunity around direct messages is really key," he said, adding that "it's a way to connect with anyone in the world and expect to hear from them."