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Dropbox Hires Head of Product, Todd Jackson From Twitter

Jackson has the tech equivalent of an Ivy League degree, having done tours of duty at Google and Facebook.

Dropbox

After an extended search, Dropbox has finally nailed down its head of product. Todd Jackson, who ran Twitter’s content and discovery team, will be leading Dropbox’s charge into business products as well as shepherding its consumer growth.

Jackson has the tech equivalent of an Ivy League degree, having done tours of duty at Google and Facebook as well.

He left Facebook to start the app Cover, which surfaced different apps to mobile home screens depending on people’s location and time of day. When Twitter acquired Cover, Jackson joined the social network as director of product management. He oversaw Twitter’s timeline, search function and the new logged-out homepage.

Jackson is the latest departure from Twitter, which has seen a flood of talent leaving both before and after Twitter CEO Dick Costolo stepped down.

As Re/code reported, Dropbox was previously in discussions with Google’s Neal Mohan for the role but nothing came of it.

In contrast to Mohan, Jackson doesn’t have much experience scaling an organization. The Dropbox role is a big step up in hierarchy for him — before Twitter, his most senior role at a big company was as a product manager.

But Dropbox can rely on Dennis Woodside, its COO, for scaling. It wants Jackson to focus instead on bringing the company’s mobile offerings up to speed, according to a Re/code source. In half a decade, phone-first millennials will represent a big chunk of the workforce (estimates range from 35 percent to 50 percent), so it’s crucial for the cloud storage company to nail its business-on-the-go features.

Dropbox’s head of product role is a key one as the company fights cloud storage competitors on both the enterprise and consumer end. The company has been criticized for not having enough features to satisfy its business customers, and its consumer offerings are threatened by deals from the likes of Google and Microsoft, among others.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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