Snapchat VP of Product Tom Conrad steps down

Amid the rapid redesign being undertaken, Snapchat's Vice President - Product Tom Conrad has stepped down from his position, and will serve in his current role till March.

As per company sources, Snap's director of growth Jacob Andreou will reportedly take over his role at an executive level, though no official new title has been assigned to him.

"I started making software when I was 18 years old, and it's hard to believe I've been doing this for 30 years. It's time for me to put my energy outside of tech, into music, food, photography and things closer to art than entrepreneurship. It's easy to put these things off forever but I didn't want to wake up 10 years from now and not have explored these other passions of mine," Conrad told TechCrunch.

Conrad, who is exiting the industry on the whole, has been with Snap Inc for nearly two years now. Prior to this, he served as the co-founder and CTO of Pandora, where he spent 10 years leading the teams responsible for product design, software engineering, and technical operations.

In a bid to regain its old user base, Snapchat has been introducing a host of new features, which, the company claims, has the potential to drastically affect its business.

While the revamps has received mix responses, the company CEO Evan Spiegel said he was "willing to risk" undertaking the transformation for the betterment of the business.

"One thing that we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use, and our team has been working on responding to this feedback. As a result, we are currently redesigning our application to make it easier to use," Spiegel had said earlier in November.