How Twitter plans to add its next 100 million users

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The company wants to add 100 million daily users by the end of the year, a growth of 50 percent from where it is now. In order to get users to engage with the app more regularly, it will need to add users at a much faster pace than it has in the past.

After appointing a new CEO in November, the company has continued to change its leadership and structure. On Thursday, the company announced its latest changes, appointing three new consumer product leaders under the unit's general manager, Kayvon Beykpour: Jay Sullivan, VP of consumer product, and Arnaud Weber, VP of consumer product engineering.

They want to fix a problem with the service, that most people don't post. The head of consumer design puts it bluntly: "We don't have trouble getting people to sign up for Twitter." Retaining those customers is something we have trouble with.

The three leaders who set the direction of how Twitter works for users and developers talk about their top priorities and challenges as the team tries to hit its aggressive growth targets.

Restructuring to ship faster

The company's struggles to evolve haven't been for a lack of new ideas, but rather internal disfunction. In 2015, after Jack Dorsey returned as a part-time CEO, the company became largely governed by committee, with executives controlling their own fiefdoms. Features would never see the light of day.

When the new CEO reorganizes the executive team around three core divisions, it's clear that it's a sign of things to come. The structure is meant to allow divisions to have their own teams.

There has been a shift in how things get done, but there hasn't necessarily been a shift in strategy.

Weber says that the influence of Agrawal is being felt in how products are developed. We increase the size of the experiments and look at metrics.

Building stickier Twitter features

Sullivan said that the top product priority is making the service more relevant to each individual person.

A tentpole feature of this approach is called Topics, which shows related tweets around themes like a sports game or TV show.

To address its engagement problem, the team has been testing a feature called Communities, which acts like a mix of Facebook Groups and Reddit fortweeting with others who share specific interests.

One thing I hear from people is that they read a lot. I don't know when or why I should use a social media platform. Sullivan says that he would feel better if he was more involved in a smaller community of people.

The Spaces audio chat feature was built in response to the rapid rise of Clubhouse during the Pandemics. Sullivan says that in the last couple of weeks, there have been multiple Spaces about Russia's invasion of Ukraine with over 100,000 listens.

Image: Twitter

The service needs its own answer to the rise of TikTok, given how the company squandered its early opportunity with the shuttering of Vine. She points to a recent public test that turned the Explore page into a near-fullscreen feed of video like TikTok, saying the hope is to have it be more lighthearted content or news content depending on what we know about you.

Opportunities in decentralization

It wasn't a surprise that Jack Dorsey's interest incryptocurrencies wasn't a surprise. Even though he is no longer with the company, it is still possible for them to experiment with new features and invest in Bluesky, an ambitious project that aims to change the company from a centralized company to something like an email app running atop an open protocol.

Bluesky is a bigger effort to rebuild the architecture of the site. There will be different choices at that layer about everything from interface to moderation.

A lot about Bluesky is unclear, since the entity was just stood up with Dorsey on its board and as a key investor to fund its development. It is not clear what Bluesky means for the business of Twitter. The question of how we create that environment, at least from theUI or the customer experience, is really fascinating and interesting.

For all the people who feel like they are adding value, they should be able to directly connect with the people who receive value.

Sullivan doesn't believe in a single solution for a customer problem. We should always put the customer first, because we always build on the shoulders of the previous things.