Twitter Edit Button Faced 18-Month Delay Due to Pre-Musk Internal Bureaucracy, Ex-Employee Reveals

Haraldur Thorleifsson, a former Twitter employee known as Halli, recently shed light on the significant internal dysfunction that plagued the company before Elon Musk's acquisition, detailing the arduous journey to implement the long-requested edit button. Thorleifsson, who joined Twitter in 2021 following the acquisition of his design agency Ueno, was tasked with forming a team to develop the feature just two weeks into his tenure.

Despite a swift design process, which Thorleifsson stated took "about a day," the actual implementation faced immense resistance. He described a corporate culture where "anyone at the company could say no to an idea and it would be killed," hindering progress on the highly anticipated feature. This internal inertia meant that simply getting an engineering estimate for the edit button became a four-month battle.

The initial estimate for building the "simple feature" came back at a staggering 18 months, highlighting the deep-seated inefficiencies within the company. Through extensive "wheeling and dealing," this timeline was eventually reduced to approximately eight months, but the resulting solution was deemed "extremely flawed and limited" by Thorleifsson. This protracted development aligns with broader critiques of Twitter's pre-Musk era, where innovation was often stifled by bureaucratic layers.

By the time the edit button finally launched, the head of design and product who had initiated the project and assigned it to Thorleifsson had both been dismissed. Furthermore, Thorleifsson's team received no credit for their work, with a new head of product announcing the launch. When he requested that the designer involved from day one be acknowledged, he received an "angry phone call."

Thorleifsson concluded his account with a scathing indictment of the company's prior management, stating, "Twitter was the worst managed company I have ever experienced." His revelations underscore the challenges faced by teams attempting to introduce changes within the platform's pre-acquisition structure.