Esther Crawford led Twitter Blue and the company’s payments project, emerging as one of the company’s most prominent product managers.
Twitter product manager Esther Crawford no longer has a job at the company following yet another wave of layoffs, according to Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer. Crawford headed up various projects at Twitter, including the company’s Blue with verification subscription as well as Twitter’s forthcoming payments platform.
During her time at Twitter, Crawford emerged as one of Twitter’s most prominent product managers under Elon Musk’s leadership, and notably tweeted a picture of herself on the floor of Twitter’s office in a sleeping bag and eye mask. “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” the tweet reads.
This latest round of layoffs is at least the fourth one since Musk assumed ownership of Twitter last November. According to Schiffer, the layoffs affected “well above 50” people and were spread throughout multiple departments. They also included Martijn de Kuijper, the founder of the now-shuttered Revue newsletter platform that Twitter acquired in 2021.
Crawford “began angling for a bigger role” shortly after Musk’s takeover, as documented in this inside look at Twitter from Schiffer, Casey Newton, and The Verge’s Alex Heath. She also commented on Musk’s massive layoffs that halved the company’s workforce last year, and at the time wrote on Slack that “drastic cuts were going to be required to survive, no matter who owned the company.”
