Dick Costolo Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) – CEO spoke at The Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference. Below is an interesting part of the transcript where Dick discusses Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR)‘s latest experiment with Facebook style designs.
Heath Terry – Goldman Sachs & Co. – Analyst
How does Twitter think about testing new product designs? There’s been some attention paid in the last few days to a new website design that’s been called Facebook like. How do you design goals for desktop and mobile differ?
Dick Costolo – Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) – CEO
Yes so we’re going to be doing — you will see us doing — you mentioned this in your previous question, a significant amount of experimentation with different ideas that we have all flowing from that vision of being this indispensable companion to life in the moment. I would — it’s interesting and it’s curious to me that some of the things get more attention than others in the press that are maybe even thought about a little bit differently internally but that’s I guess neither here nor there.
To answer your specific question about design, it will be the case that again, in service to bringing the content in Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR)forward and pushing the scaffolding of Twitter some of that opaque language of Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) to the background, you will see us experiment with different things on different form factors. On the web, on the profiles page specifically with regards to that experiment, it’s more about pulling that content forward and pushing the scaffolding to the background.
Heath Terry – Goldman Sachs & Co. – Analyst
That, the pace, just from an outside observer, the pace of that experimentation seems to have accelerated dramatically in the last few months. What’s enabled that acceleration and how representative do you feel like that it is now of what Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) is capable of from an engineering perspective?
Dick Costolo – Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR)
Sure. I’ll say two things about that. One is it’s absolutely been a focus of mine and the product team’s over the course of the last 12 months and just maybe I’ll add a little bit more color. We have two sort of product functions. We have a revenue organization that really pays attention to the ad platform, the self-serve platform, the MoPub piece and then a consumer product organization. And those two organizations report up to me and we’ve spent a bunch of time over the course of the last year building out a framework that enables us to have a product cadence specifically with regards to delivering mobile releases for IOS, Android, etcetera more quickly .
And I like the way that’s going, as well as a product velocity framework that allows us to run more experiments and more idea, test more ideas in parallel. So for example, we’re now releasing android releases once a week. That’s much, much faster than it was just a year ago and the volume of ideas we’re able to test in parallel now us much, much greater than it was a year ago.
Interestingly, when you get to the point where you can start to test many more things at once, one of my particular focuses now with the organization is about making sure they have a biased impact. I mean I specifically refer to it as a biased impact to make sure we’re experimenting with the most impactful ideas we have, again, in service to making Twitter that indispensable companion, life in the moment.
