After replacing much of Twitter’s top management team last year, Dick Costolo told members of the company’s board that he wanted them to replace him as chief executive, too.
On Thursday, they did just that, announcing that Mr. Costolo will step down July 1 and appointing Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former chief, as interim chief executive while they look for a permanent successor.
Mr. Costolo, a wealthy former entrepreneur who has led Twitter for the last five years, had grown tired of second-guessing by Wall Street, with its focus on the social network’s sluggish user growth and its repeated failures to make its products more appealing. In January, he confided to friends at the Consumer Electronics Show in January that he did not need the aggravation anymore.
Instead of beginning an immediate search for a new chief executive, the board kept him on, encouraging him to build up his management team and lay out a strategy for it to follow.
“There is never, ever the right time to begin a transition like this,” Mr. Costolo told investors in a call to discuss the leadership transition. But “you want to do these things when the org is stable and the product is robust.”
Even as Mr. Costolo and his lieutenants promoted their early progress in reinvigorating the company’s products, criticism of his strategy grew. Last week, one of the company’s biggest shareholders and cheerleaders, Chris Sacca, publicly called for change.
Twitter shares rose more than 7 percent in after-hours trading immediately after the change in leadership was announced.
Now Twitter, which has 302 million active users, faces deep questions about the future of its messaging service, which is built around 140-character snippets of text in a world that is increasingly about photos and video.
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