Daniel Graf Demoted As Twitter's Head Of Product, Rising Superstar Kevin Weil To Take His Place

After being hired away from Google just six months ago, Daniel Graf has been demoted from his position as head of product at Twitter. Replacing him will be Kevin Weil, who joined in 2009 as a data scientist and turned into something of a rising superstar within the company.

Graf’s title of vice president of product won't change, but he will no longer be in charge of Twitter's consumer product team per a change in his executive bio. Given his work on the Google Maps app while at Google, he will now be working on Twitter strategy with respect to geo and location features. Meanwhile, Weil becomes Twitter's fifth head of product in five years just days after two key employees leave the company on good terms: Jeremy Gordon, VP of engineering, and Adam Kinney, senior manager for Twitter’s analytics.

Weil was promoted to vice president of revenue products last year, and is in fact responsible for building Twitter's revenue business upon his hire in 2009. He's the youngest executive reporting to CEO Dick Costolo, and is known internally for executing plans quickly. This dovetails beautifully with a comment from Costolo during this week's earnings call that Twitter needs to "increase [its] pace of execution."

Twitter's unremarkable user growth demonstrates that the company is under pressure to start showing some concrete innovation in its product to grow its membership. Costolo faces the perception that Twitter is a service for the technologically literate, which needs to be overcome if the company hopes to turn into the social, revenue-generating giant it wants to be. This reorganization seems designed to position Twitter closer to achieving that goal.