Who Is The Real Customer For Twitter?, Trevor Noah On Super Apps & Coup In The Magic Kingdom
Hari Abburi
Helping CEOs & Top Teams Be At The Speed Of The Customer? | Author, Speaker, Educator, Board Advisor
Wishing You An Agile 2023!
& The world said in one breath, Oh Tweet!
As the Twitter story unfolded, I was tempted to jump into the debate. But I held back to see how the first three months would play out on the most critical aspect: How will Musk define who Twitter's customer is?. Here is my three point tear down for Twitter watchers:
Jack Dorsey ran out out steam multitasking between Twitter and the now Block to reinvent Twitter's future beyond being a platform for ranters and political noise. Parag Agrawal, his successor did not bring deep platform thinking to the CEOs job. But he did one thing amazingly well: he put the brash and risk taking billionaire Elon Musk into his place by enforcing the acquisition agreement and protecting the shareholders.
None of the issues tackled so far by Musk - content moderation team reduction, services around Twitter Blue or renaming of Bird to Community have indicated the deep thinking required to reshape "the worlds most toxic town square".
Musk has become Twitter's own 'drunk uncle at Thanksgiving' rather than driving focus on real customers. In Jack Welch's words, Twitter under Musk is GE when Welch stepped in as GE's CEO - "Face to the boss and ass to the customer"
Twitter has all the problems of social media platforms combined with the problems of new age media companies. Advertisers often become the focus rather than the real users of the platform. Building winning experiences for users that drive advertisers to be part of the platform is something obvious but missed in most individualistic leader centric transformations.
The potential for twitter to reinvent itself at the intersection of being a town-square, news & media, live streaming events, embedded finance & Fintech, Web3 tokenization, community engagement tools for brands, curated content for users and live commerce is ginormous. The opportunity is as ginormous as Musk's ego. The Super App ambition of Musk needs radical customer centricity not Musk centricity.
The 'Musk Premium' enjoyed by Tesla's market performance quickly vanished as the lack of vision and strategy for Twitter lay bare.
2. Transformative Leadership Vs Individual Tied Brand Value
I love Musk for Space X and Tesla. But you could argue that Space X while so radically imaginative still has strong oversight from NASA and Government regulators that shield it from the Musk mood swings or the weed smoke. In fact, its stability is also because of an outstanding leader in Gwen Shotwell. Musk enjoys tinkering, solving complex engineering problems where there is no other dimension of society, politics, advertisers or geopolitics involved.
Tesla on the other hand has gone through its roller coster moments with Musk. It lacks the operating discipline of a Ford. Wildly imaginative but stuck where it is for the past four years. Its valuation of about $550 billion fluctuates with every tweet from Musk. Tesla while a pioneer, is yet to become a brand that drives innovation and scale in either EV or autonomous driving space. My bet is still on Ford to become the winner in this race.
Let's take a quick comparative:
Musk is on the spot about the outdated need for supervisors or mangers who are just activity aggregators or orchestrators. I firmly believe that the greatest roadblock to transformative change are managers who have no hands-on responsibilities - the very definition of bureaucracy. Twitter layoffs while poorly done, eliminated the barrier to its transformative change. But where is the vision?
Very few CEOs can do this and probably only as a privately owned enterprise. The fact remains: Twitter still runs with 50% of the workforce. Musk's view that supervisors also do a significant amount of design or programming work is key to transformation at Twitter. Google as an outcome of its Project Oxygen had similar thinking. By having a large supervisory span of control, they believed that managers would not have the time to micro manage or sandbox innovation in their teams.
Execution is an obsessive leadership art form. Twitter needed this to shake off the lethargy
3. Can Twitter Ever Be A Super App? From Features To Platform To Ecosystem Is Not An Engineering Dimension To Solve
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I have been an avid Twitter user since 2009. But in all these years while the app became slicker in design, the functionalities and utility remained the same. The only new addition was 'Spaces' - an opportunity lost in becoming a true live podcast platform that was business or professional centric. Twitter's continued thinking of traditional product management accentuated by Musk's view of it as an engineering problem will only ensure Twitter's irrelevance. But Musk, a founding member of PayPal (hence a fall back comfort zone to payments), does not seem to grasp the power of platform thinking, especially in a segment where the creator economy combined with advertisers and public users without industry boundaries creates a different set of variables than talking about a single product in a single industry play - Tesla.
Super App is multi-industry business model 'follow your customer' decision, not simply an UX/UI set of choices. Creating utility to the customer requires radical changes to the business.
Super App is not an app based service model. It is fundamental business model decision. It is to become a multi-sided platform with multiple network effects in play. In fact, the super app business model at its heart allows a company to follow their customers without industry or service boundaries. WeChat and Grab are great examples. Payments is the low hanging fruit, but streaming entertainment, live sports, micro gaming, community management features for brands are all great integration opportunities that also attract advertisers to cut across the customer habits. Even conglomerates like TATAs are learning that creating a super app does not mean the consumers will adopt new habits.
In the end, one should not forget that Twitter under Musk is a mess directly attributable to Dorsey. One had not figured the customer and other forgot the customer.
Quick Take: The Trend Of Dracula CEOs: Never Say Die
2022 has seen some significant sudden leadership transitions. We had one in Howard Shultz of Starbucks (Related reads on Starbucks from last year in May and October ) . Now we have Bob Iger who made a stunning return but not a surprise to Disney watchers as apparently he still had an office where he held meetings with no formal role.
Fortune refers to them as 'Boomerang CEOs '. Others include Steve Ellis (Chipotle), Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Edward Green (DuPont), Michell Dell (Dell), A.G. Lafely (P&G), Boomerang CEOs are also unusually likely to be founders. Founders made up 44% of the UNC study’s boomerang CEOs according to Fortune .
What causes the Board to affirm faith in the present CEO appointed anointed with the song from Lion King to so abruptly to bring back the previous one?: A Board that runs away from difficult choices and diverts attention from its own lack of accountability
For Starbucks, unionization movement was a trigger, for Disney losing its independent status in Orlando was one. However you may look at this, the success of the succession is as much in the hands of the outgoing CEO, ask Indra Nooyi for having done a real smooth transition at PepsiCo. It will be interesting to see how Amazon plays out. But the big one to watch in the near to medium term is Tim Cook's succession, which will probably take its leadership outside the founding circle for the first time.
"I Hope Bob Iger Has One Foot Out the Door." - Abigail Disney (Read )
Also a fact that ex CEOs want to celebrate themselves after their tenure but do so in a manner that retains informal influence with the Boards of companies they served at. And to an extent be overtly political as to never fade away.
Elon Musk may appoint a buddy as CEO at Twitter but he is not going anywhere. The real issue is engineers don't make good natural people managers or CEOs. Welch and Nadella are exceptions to the norm.
Advisor: healthcare strategy, biz models, & partnerships | Platforms, AI, digital health & ecosystems | Career experience across 150+ organizations | Platforming Health and Care!
1 年Hari, thanks for a thought-provoking article. I too have been an avid Twitter user for over a decade, but threw in the towel about a month ago. I fear that the handwriting is on the wall--that under Musk's reign, Twitter is doomed. We agree on much. Strategy is critical, and there is none at Twitter right now. And, "platform thinking" is a useful lens to analyze the company. Musk never recognized the inherent dilemma (i.e., fundamental tradeoff) in running Twitter: * "Maximizing" free speech * Policing mis/disinformation on the platform Can Twitter become a super app? IMO that's wishful thinking when the core interactions on the platform are unstable and falling apart. You nailed it when you wrote: "Twitter's continued thinking of traditional product management accentuated by Musk's view of it as an engineering problem will only ensure Twitter's irrelevance." SpaceX and Tesla can be viewed as an engineering challenge; Twitter is fundamentally a people challenge.