Twitter Appoints Product Chief, Replacing One Named 6 Months Ago

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter has had so much drama in the executive suite that it could be the subject of a television series called “Game of Tweets.”

On Thursday, the company said it had named a new executive to oversee all of its products — its fourth product chief in just a few years — to speed its sluggish efforts to make its social network easier and more compelling for new users and veterans.

The new product chief, Kevin Weil, 31, is a rising star at Twitter and had been in charge of revenue products — essentially advertising. This provides almost all of Twitter’s income and is an area where it has been viewed as an agile innovator. A smart, personable physicist who joined the company in 2009, Mr. Weil has become an increasingly trusted lieutenant to Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive.

The former head of products, Daniel Graf, is still with the product team but was demoted.

Mr. Graf, a former Google Maps executive, was brought in with great fanfare six months ago to replace the previous product chief, Michael Sippey, who in turn took over from Satya Patel. But Twitter has made few public product improvements since then, and Mr. Graf has been reluctant to share even his broad strategy with outsiders.

On Monday, when Twitter announced disappointing growth in sign-ups and usage as part of its third-quarter financial results, Mr. Costolo told impatient investors, “It’s more critical than ever to increase our overall pace of execution.”

Mr. Weil’s work is an example of the kind of fast execution that Mr. Costolo values.

“Kevin is extremely smart and extremely well liked inside and outside of Twitter,” said Debra Aho Williamson, a social media analyst at the research firm eMarketer, who knows him. “They’ve had these problems attracting new users. If Kevin can work his magic on the consumer side, it will be great for Twitter.”

Most recently, Mr. Weil’s team met a steady string of tough deadlines to put out Fabric, Twitter’s new suite of development tools for app developers, at a conference this month. The company is banking on the tools, which vastly simplify the process of building apps, to extend its influence — and its advertising — far beyond its core service.

Twitter has never had a stable leadership team, with its founders hatching plots against each other from the company’s earliest days.

But the company has had a constant stream of executive changes this year — most notably the departure of its chief operating officer, Ali Rowghani, and the arrival of a new chief financial officer, the former Goldman Sachs banker Anthony Noto, who has effectively become the new No. 2 executive at the company.

Typically, executive shifts at Twitter are announced through its signature 140-character messages. Sometimes the goodbyes are bland, sometimes they are cryptic. Occasionally, they are operatic, as with Chloe Sladden, who in June announced her departure as head of media in a series of a dozen linked Twitter posts.

In the case of Mr. Weil, Twitter quietly disclosed the leadership change by including his new title in a securities filing updating his holdings of stock and options.

Mr. Weil began his career at Twitter as an engineer managing much of the company’s analytics. He quickly moved to the advertising side, where he helped build the company’s range of offerings for advertisers, including its unique products tying ads shown on Twitter to similar ones on live television. Recently, he became deeply involved in some nonadvertisement products, like  the hosting and automatic previewing of video clips on the site.

In his new role, he will work closely with Alexander Roetter, the vice president of engineering, who also moved over from the advertising side in May when Mr. Costolo pushed out Chris Fry as part of his previous round of moves to speed innovation at the company.