VP Of Product Michael Sippey Is Leaving Twitter

Twitter’s Vice President of Product Michael Sippey just announced that he’s stepping into an advisory role at the company, then moving on to, well, something else.

In a company email that Sippey also posted on his blog, he said he realized that “it was time to move on” after discussions with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and COO Ali Rowghani. Sippey doesn’t go into too much detail, but he hints that he wants to be at a smaller company again: “I’ve spent most of my career working at startups, helping them scale and having a direct hand on the product.”

It sounds like team members at Twitter have been frustrated with the product leadership, at least according to AllThingsD’s Mike Isaac and our own Matthew Panzarino. Isaac described the problem as a lack of a clear path for moving product changes “up the ladder at an efficient pace,” while Panzarino suggested that there was an overreliance on user testing.

Sippey’s post says that as an advisor, he will be “helping with product strategy, providing input on the great work the team has lined up for 2014, and helping [COO] Ali [Rowghani] find a new head of product.” It sounds like that’s mostly a transitional role, because afterward, he’s “excited to go figure out what’s next.”

Sippey has been at Twitter since 2012. He was previously at blog platform Six Apart and then at Say Media, the media company formed from the merger of Six Apart and VideoEgg.