Twitter’s product head Esther Crawford among those fired, calls her hard work a mistake

“The worst take you could have from watching me go all-in on Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake. Those who jeer & mock are necessarily on the sidelines and not in the arena. I’m deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise & chaos,” the former product head said in a tweet.

Crawford’s exit was first reported by newsletter-based publication Platformer.

Crawford was one of the executives in charge of Twitter Blue, the site’s subscription service. In the days after Musk’s takeover of Twitter, she notably tweeted in a post that went viral that employees sometimes will have to #SleepWhereYouWork to meet deadlines.

Further, according to an NYT report, Twitter fired at least 200 employees as part of its latest layoffs.

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The job cuts, which took place on Saturday night and impacted product managers, data scientists, and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability, can be seen as another attempt from Musk to stem the sharp drop in the company’s revenues.

Earlier US-based tech publication The Information reported that Twitter had fired employees in the eighth such round of job cuts since Musk took over.

Crawford received praise on Twitter from several investors and tech founders for rebuilding Twitter ever since the tumultuous takeover.

“We all loved and believed in the product, the public platform, and our teams. Sorry you had to go through the dissolution of all of this,” said Amir Shevat, the chief product officer at Reshuffle HQ, an open-source integration framework that lets developers build workflows & connect systems.

Twitter acquired Reshuffle HQ in 2021.

Replying to Crawford’s tweet, Alex Kruglov, one of the founding members of the streaming platform Hulu, said: “Regardless of whether I root for Twitter 2.0, I root for you, your commitment, and your dedication. It’s definitely the way to build. Thank you.”