Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

New Yahoo Management Structure: The Entire Memo

Along with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz’s external email earlier today, the company also outlined the new structure in another memo.

It’s pretty much what BoomTown has been reporting all week about the reorg.

Top-down simplification, which is another word for: Carol rules over Yahoo (YHOO).

CTO Ari Balogh gets a lot of stuff as new head of products, and so does U.S. head Hilary Schneider, including mobile, as EVP of North American Region. Both report to Bartz.

Unmentioned, but Audience Products head Ash Patel is still in. So is General Counsel Michael Callahan.

New chief marketing officer is Elisa Steele, who come from NetApps (NTAP). Bartz happens to be on the board of NetApps, by the way.

New International head TBD.

Bartz also sent an email to employees about the changes.

Here is the entire memo:

New Yahoo! Management Structure Overview

February 26, 2009

· Our goal as a company is simple: to consistently deliver awesome consumer and advertiser experiences everywhere in the world we do business. So we’re creating an organization to enable improvements in our product quality and operational efficiency, as well as clear decision making and accountability.

· Tech and Product groups will be combined to create a single organization called Products. Products will be led by Ari Balogh as EVP of Products and CTO, reporting to Carol Bartz, with the goal of enabling extraordinary consumer experiences tied to compelling advertiser and publisher offerings. This organization is responsible for the vision, strategy, and quality of every product we create–regardless of region, device format or category.

· There are now two regions–North America and International. The regions are responsible for delivering Yahoo!’s products, programming and services to consumers, partners and advertisers in local markets. North America will be led by Hilary Schneider, EVP, North American Region, reporting to Carol Bartz. International’s leader will be hired soon.

. Mobile will continue to be a key priority for Yahoo!. Going forward, David Ko will lead the mobile business, strategy and monetization teams for Yahoo! (Head of Global Mobile Business, reporting to Hilary Schneider). All of our product teams will be responsible for incorporating mobile innovations into their products.

· A Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) role has been created to oversee our global marketing strategy and provide direction for our marketing function. Today, we named our new CMO, Elisa Steele. Elisa starts on March 23. She will bring together the various marketing teams that have been spread across the company.

· A new Customer Advocacy group will help us to better hear the voice of the customer (consumers/advertisers) across the company and incorporate what we hear into all our work throughout Yahoo!. We will hire a new leader for this team.

· The newly created Service Engineering & Operations (SE&O) team will be chartered with delivering common technology services at scale, including application management and infrastructure. The team will be led by David Dibble, SVP of SE&O. We’re bringing Service Engineering together as one group because these engineers bring expertise that is best applied horizontally.

· Our corporate functions will consist of HR led by David Windley, Legal led by Michael Callahan, and our CFO is to be hired, with Blake Jorgensen remaining through the transition. Joel Jones will serve as Carol Bartz’s chief of staff.

· This structure is designed to last two to four years; however, we’ll continue to make adjustments as needed. But we expect this core structure will stay in place.

· These changes become effective immediately.

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— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald