It was announced today that Teresa Dietrich will be joining Stack Overflow as a Chief Product Officer. When reading the website, there seems to be little to no information regarding this function.
Next to a welcome, my question is: What will be their role at SEI?
Complete speculation:
Money has been diverted from paying people to work with the community (Robert, Shog) to paying people to help build sellable products.
That is, Teams and whatever other monetisable output Stack Exchange is / will have.
I think it unlikely that there's much hidden meaning behind a fairly standard job title.
Editorial:
Interesting how literally none of it was covered by the company on Meta or the blog, though. Very underhanded. The CEO's press statement is also rather telling:
"I'm thrilled that Teresa is joining our leadership team to help define and execute on our product strategy for this new era of Stack Overflow,” said Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow. “Teresa is an incredibly talented technical leader who has a deep understanding of our core customers - developers and technical workers. Her excellent execution skills and understanding of the developer workflow make her a great fit for our organization."
This isn't an accident, friends. Every single action taken by SE over the past year or so is a clear signal of a fundamental pivot. I do believe, though, that this is the first time it's been spelt out, and so spelling it out here may have been by accident. (In the press again, naturally. 🤣)
I would be remiss, however, to omit Dietrich's statement:
“I have long been fascinated and impressed by the community and collaboration platform that Stack Overflow has built for technologists,” said Dietrich. “I am eager to leverage my passion and experience with the amazing team at Stack Overflow in the next stage of their journey. I am so excited and energized by Stack Overflow’s huge potential to expand the scope and scale of their impact on technologists’ careers, and champion community growth and inclusion due to the ever-increasing demand for technology talent.
My interpretation is that this alludes to the various communities out there (read: business employee pools) that can be grown and made more inclusive by following Stack Overflow's lead.
It appears that SEI is pivoting their focus towards Stack Overflow for Teams in an attempt to increase revenue. The press release has this line,
There, she served as Global Head of Product & Engineering and played an instrumental role in creating and scaling world-class B2B SaaS products
Which leads me to believe that will be their focus as Chief Product Officer. In terms of the pivot, recall what Spolsky said at the end of the Series D funding,
Spolsky says that two-thirds of its revenues today come from recruitment services, via its Stack Overflow Careers site, and one-third from advertising.
Most likely the revenue from recruitment has been fairly stagnant along with ads leading the new leadership to focus on new product lines.
The completely speculative answer makes extremely valid points, I don't have much to add about that, besides: yes, it looks like SE Inc. is "re-focusing" on its "core business" to increase ROI for their investors.
Yet, this is tagged discussion, so let me add this:
When reading the website, there seems to be little to no information regarding this function.
I think that is the really essential core of everything. Sure, there also seems to a bit of incompetence around and politically motivated over-welcoming-issues. But in the end, it might be all about a company trying to find strategies that lead to long-term business success. There are people who put in their money to get this company going, and some day, these people want to see results. A business needs to make profit, or it is doomed.
And honestly: I think that is okay. Everything changes, and old promises don't get employees their paycheck. But the essential element here: transparency!
Assume SE Inc. had just stated something like this:
We think we can't get to robust roadmap while upholding "promises" given 5 or 10 years ago. We think we need to ramp up on the stackoverflow side of things, and reduce efforts for all the smaller communities. We know this will be painful to many, but we are willing to sit down with the communities to find solutions that work for all of us. ...
in 2019. Sure, we would have wept, and screamed, but hey: there would have been a chance to work on that together.
I think: you can even make such announcements in a way that convinces external business people, analysts, and shareholders. Whereas the "communication strategy" that SE Inc. decided for has a high potential of achieving the exact opposite. I would hope that any decent analyst figured by now that SE Inc. managed to drive away the expert-content-providers in masses.
Note the focus on "technologists", not programmers. This implies to me raising up server fault/super user/etc, rather than stack overflow.
This aligns with that incredibly ambiguous question on the stackoverflow meta: What does "Should we add technical Q&A sites like Server Fault, Super User, and DevOps to Stack Overflow?" mean?
