Twitter doubles down on India tech team to create products for the world

New Delhi: Twitter, which has seen its tech team in India grow over 150 per cent last year from 2020, is further expanding the teams under new CEO Parag Agrawal -- in order to build more products locally and take those to the world, top company executives said here on Tuesday.

Apurva Dalal, Engineering Site Lead, Twitter India, said that the micro-blogging platform has ambitious plans for India this year.

"We are excited about the growth and the opportunities that we're creating in the country. In order to scale our reach and build a service that is truly for Indians and by Indians, we are committed to expanding our technical teams in the country," Dalal told IANS.

"Our goal is to innovate in India for our audiences here and take those solutions to the world, which is why we are putting in place in market product, research, design, data science and engineering teams in India," he added.

Starting this week, Twitter will test a Cricket Tab on its Explore page, rolling out the experiment to some people in India who use Twitter on Android.

Last month, Twitter rolled out an experiment to test a dedicated, curated tab for the Indian Premier League (IPL) to improve discoverability of content and enhance content consumption by surfacing the most relevant content and conversations, in the lead up to and throughout the course of the tournament.

In December last year, it started testing a revamped, more personalised Explore page to make it easier for people to unwind, find new interests and see what's happening.

According to Dalal, beyond engineering, Twitter is scaling tech teams with senior hires across product management, revenue science, design, research and data science.

"The hires across verticals are a testimony of our commitment to grow our team in India and build a service that is made in India, for Indians," said Dalal.

According to him, the expansion of the tech hub in India is in alignment with the company's overall belief that decentralisation of engineering talent is important.

"It brings a diverse perspective and makes sense to represent our product that is used globally," Dalal told IANS.

Shirish Andhare, Director and Head of Product, Twitter India, said that India is a priority market for Twitter.

"We're building unique product solutions specifically catered to audiences in India. Our tech team is focused on building more daily utility for both our new and existing audiences on Twitter, with capabilities ranging from product development, research and design as well as data science and machine learning," Andhare told IANS.

The company's global goal is to double its development velocity by 2023, and reach 315 million mDAU (monetisable daily active users) by Q4 2023.

"In India, mDAU grew by 74 per cent (on-year) in Q4 2020. Increasing development velocity and improving engineering scale globally will pave the way to achieve our ambitions around growing mDAU at a 20 per cent compound annual growth rate by 2023 globally," said the Twitter India executives.

Twitter said the expansion of the tech hub in India is in alignment with the company's overall belief that decentralisation of engineering talent is important.

"It brings a diverse perspective and makes sense to represent our product that is used globally," Dalal noted.