When Chris Fry stepped down last week as senior vice-president of engineering at Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR), he became the second senior executive to get a shove from CEO Dick Costolo. The firm’s former vice-president of consumer product, Michael Sippey, took an advisory role at the company in January.

For the year to date, Twitter shares are down more than 50% — shades of J.C. Penney Co. Inc. (NYSE: JCP) — and from their peak in late December shares are down 55%. Most of the blame is down to slowing user growth.

In the first quarter of this year, Twitter broke even and posted revenue of $250 million, both figures beating expectations. But additions to the company’s monthly active users (MAUs) did not meet expectations and sequential MAU growth was especially tepid.

Sippey told The Verge in January that continual innovation is his lodestar:

In terms of where we want [Twitter] to go, we’re constantly working on [innovation] — constantly. You have to continually be revisiting that, because the world changes, consumer behavior changes, the competitive landscape changes. And you want to be able to react to that.

If, as Sippey says, the landscape is changing, Twitter does not appear to have reacted well to those changes, at least as measured by new MAUs. And that lack of rapid reaction time is very likely what caught up with Fry.

Are Costolo and his COO, Ali Rowghani, panicking? What is decisiveness to some observers is panic to others. What is clear is that Twitter hasn’t found the secret that will give investors what they want from the company — share price growth. Playing musical chairs at the top is not guaranteed to fix the problem.

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