TWITTER

Client

Twitter  //  Snr Design Director

Role

California calling. I'd been spending huge amounts of time travelling between London and California for Google, being away from family for weeks on end did not sit well with me as I am Dad first, always. After much consideration we decided (as a family) it would be a great adventure to move to California. Twitter knocked on my door and offered me the position of senior design director for Revenue. At that time Twitter was a company of two-halves, Consumer (known as Bluebird), and Revenue (known as Goldbird). I would be responsible for the Design & Research function for the entire business side of Twitter, I would grow a diverse team, improve the product experience across multiple Twitter products, services and businesses. I would set a long-term vision for durability beyond our ads business and set new standards for design excellence at Twitter. This work would in turn inform and influence the consumer offerings for the Twitter application itself.

This has been the most rewarding work experience of my life to date, and also the most challenging. The fragmented mindsets between the consumer and revenue teams showed up in the product itself. The incentives and metrics were misaligned with one team chasing MDAU (monetizable daily active usage) and the other chasing dollars to pay for the ongoing development of the consumer experience. This separation was physically manifested at the head office with the teams in separate buildings connected by a sky bridge. To make things even harder there was such deep technical debt that there was very little innovation happening, the teams had devolved into incrementalism and shipping the absolute minimal viable products ehich were rarely revisited. Product excellence was not in the hearts and minds of the cross functional partners, and the functions of design and research were seen as a service, not as a cherished and equal partner.

This was quite the culture shock, having come from Google where everything starts with cross functional alignment and collaboration through design sprints, it felt like the wild west. With fiefdoms everywhere, teams operating independently from each other and defending their territories to maintain a sense of security. There were no consistent practices, and there was no appetite for big picture thinking, this meant there was no vision, no North Star to guide and inspire the teams forward.

This was especially prevalent within the teams I was inheriting on the revenue side of the business who felt like second class citizens in comparison to their counterparts on the consumer side of the business. There was a serious lack of acknowledgement and investment, we were paralysed by technical debt.

As revenue design leader I would be responsible for the design and research of the following services and Twitter businesses:

• Advertiser Experience, the company's main revenue generator.
• Ad formats, the new and refined ways to advertise within the Twitter experience.
• MoPub, a Twitter company that provides monetization solutions for mobile app publishers and developers around the globe.
• MediaStudio, a platform to manage, measure, and monetize videos on Twitter.
• B2C, drive new ways for businesses to grow on the Twitter platform.
• Developer Platform, inspire and serve the 3rd party developers using Twitter APIs.
• Tweetdeck, a Twitter company that provides a multi-timeline user experience for consumers and journalists.
• Feather, the Twitter design system for all internal and external Twitter dashboard interfaces.
• And many more…
  

I was going to be very busy!

Strategy

We needed a complete cultural change to inspire, retain, and attract world class designers and researchers. We needed to improve our presence and reset our position as partners within the company, and we needed a consistent and refined process and procedures that would bring the teams and cross functional partners together as co-creators that collectively chase product excellence. 

• Do less, but do it well. As a small team we were seriously stretched across too many surfaces and projects. A practice of one-and-done solutions was the norm, with no time to form holistic approaches from a high altitude that would build towards a refined and connected end-to-end experience. We needed to radically prioritize the most important aspects for the business and focus on quality solutions, informed by research insights and multi-variant testing.
• Build a culture of co-creation, collaboration and partnership. Culture changes take time but I had one proven and effective strategy up my sleeve. I brought in Jake Knapp (creator of the Design Sprint methodology), and AJ+Smart to teach and run design sprints across the teams.
• Incentivize consistent practices and strive for product excellence. Partner with the product and engineering teams to define a consistent product development process for all teams to adopt. Celebrate and award landing a project well, instead of celebrating shipping incremental changes.
• Build out the functions bedrock with values, principles, transparent levels, job descriptions and a refined hiring practice that would ensure diversity and inclusion.
• Set out a vision that would align and inspire all the functions.
• Sequence the work to build towards the vision in a way that assures product excellence.
• Celebrate the team and the wins.

Outcome

I am incredibly proud of my team and our work at Twitter. In the last 4 years we have had unprecedented year-on-year revenue growth. We have diversified our portfolio of offerings making the business more durable. We have quadrupled the ‘Revenue’ design and research team at leadership and IC levels. We’ve hired a diverse team whilst maintaining very low rates of attrition. We’ve improved our methodologies and process, becoming trusted and equal partners. We have focused and improved product excellence throughout and have a vision of the future that has aligned all the functions, and we're just getting started.

*All work is ongoing and subject to confidentiality.