Snapchat poaches Twitter's senior product manager Todd Sherman
Snapchat has poached Twitter's senior product manager Todd Sherman, who announced his appointment in a tweet.
Sherman is poised to join the Snapchat team
During his tenure at Twitter he helped spearhead its move towards relaxing the hallmark 140-character limit. In a blog post earlier this year he announced that the social network would let users fit more into tweets by no longer counting media attachments and links towards the total limit.
While it’s not yet clear what role he will take up at Snapchat, Sherman confirmed that he will be based out of the company’s LA office.
The Drum was awaiting response from Snapchat representatives on his appointment.
It comes after a turbulent 12 months for Twitter’s product department.
Back in June, it confirmed that its consumer product boss, Jeff Seibert, who took over the position in September 2015 was no longer heading up the team. Seibert has since returned to running Twitter’s developer product suite Fabric, which he had already been doing before his promotion.
Four people have run Twitter’s core product since 2014, including former vice-president of product Kevin Weil who jumped ship to Instagram as part of a slew of senior departures from Twitter in January.
At the start of 2016 the reinstated Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey hired longtime American Express executive, Leslie Berland, as chief marketing officer to help tell the story of its “iconic product.” Twitter’s Q1 results, however, didn’t reflect that promise revealing growth at the “low end” of the company’s guidance range and even slower user uptake.
Snapchat has been poaching talent from rivals across the tech industry, tapping Facebook Audience Network founder Sriram Krishnan for its growth and revenue team and hiring BuzzFeed's Jonathan Davies and Twitter's Tariq Slim to front its London office.