Yahoo shakes up management structure ahead of shareholders' meet

27 June 2008

The Yahoo management, facing steady flak since it spurned Microsoft's takeover offer of $33 per share, has unveiled a major restructure to drive profits and enable "better decision making" in a move designed to deliver on CEO Jerry Yang's promise that it was right to reject a $47.5 billion takeover by Microsoft.

Yahoo yesterday announced the formation of three new divisions to be overseen by the Yahoo president, Susan Decker. Under the new order, current executive vice presidents Hilary Schneider and Ash Patel are being given expanded responsibilities over the Sunnyvale-based company's products and sales teams.

Schneider, a former newspaper executive, has been moving up the ranks since she joined Yahoo in September 2006. Patel has played a key role in developing many of Yahoo's most popular products, including its finance section and instant messaging service, since joining the company 12 years ago.

The Patel-led audience products division will be responsible for company-wide product strategy and product management. Schneider's division will be focused on "bringing products to market for users, advertisers and publishers".

The third new division is an insights strategy team that will "assume responsibility for centralising and executing a common strategy for the use of data and analysis across Yahoo". Yahoo plans to name the leader of the insights strategy team "within the next few weeks".

Yahoo is also making changes to its technology operation, led by chief technology officer Ari Balogh, to develop a "world class computing and storage infrastructure". It is forming the cloud computing and data infrastructure group.