Former Facebook and Snap exec Sriram Krishnan is joining Twitter to work on product

Twitter has hired Sriram Krishnan, a former ad tech executive from Facebook and Snap, but he won’t be working on ads.

Krishnan, who left Snap earlier this year, just a month before the company’s IPO, is joining Twitter as senior director of product. That means he’ll be responsible for a lot of the core features inside the main app, internally referred to as “Bluebird,” including timeline, direct messaging and search.

Krishnan is a well-known product guy around Silicon Valley, but he has primarily focused on ad tech. At Facebook, he helped build the company’s ad network, Audience Network; at Snap, he helped build out the company’s ads API.

Now he’s taking on a consumer product role — and for a company that has had trouble keeping consumer product execs over the past few years. In an odd twist, Twitter now has a whole mess of them.

Krishnan’s decision to join seems to be a positive sign for Twitter. It at least shows the company still has the cachet and offers enough potential upside to attract someone like Krishnan, who could probably head wherever he wanted, or start his own company. (Krishnan, for what it’s worth, is a Twitter power user.)

The internal pecking order now looks like this: CEO Jack Dorsey has two product folks reporting to him: Kayvon Beykpour, who runs all live video, including Periscope; and Ed Ho, the general manager of all product and engineering at Twitter.

Keith Coleman, who joined Twitter last December as head of product running the company’s core app, reports to Ho. And Krishnan now reports to Coleman, and appears to be taking over at least some of Coleman’s duties.

That crew has their work cut out for them. Twitter, of course, has long been saddled with product issues. Historically, critics have argued the app is too hard to use, and that the sign-up process is confusing and cumbersome, a combination that turns off new users. Those who do figure it out have then dealt with well-chronicled issues of abuse and bullying on the service. Twitter has made solving those abuse issues a key priority over the past year.

Krishnan will start in October. In a series of tweets announcing the new role, he explained that working on a product with Twitter’s impact was just too hard to pass up.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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