Seven years after being fired, the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is returning to the company as C.E.O. PHOTOGRAPH BY SCOTT EISEN / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY

Earlier this month, Twitter announced that it was bringing back one of its co-founders, Jack Dorsey, as C.E.O., to steady the tilting ship and find a way forward for one of the most beloved, misunderstood, and important social-media platforms of our age. In a plot out of a Mexican telenovela, Dorsey had been ousted, seven years ago yesterday, and then brought back by a board that included a co-founder, Evan Williams, the man who had removed and replaced him. What made the plot even more twisted was that Dorsey was going to retain the top job at a second enterprise he co-founded, Square, a payments-processing company. The dual C.E.O. roles led to obvious comparisons with Steve Jobs (who simultaneously led Apple and Pixar) and Elon Musk (SpaceX and Tesla). There were reports that Dorsey wanted this narrative, an argument that is lazy and wrong.

The C.E.O. job at Twitter isn't for the faint of heart. It is very much like trying to splice together a sliced live wire—no matter what you do, you are going to get shocked. Despite all the public hoopla, not even some of the best minds in Silicon Valley could come up with a credible candidate to take charge. Kevin Systrom's name arose a few times, without his advocates wondering why the Instagram founder would want to fix a broken property that his own company is beating in the market. The Twitter board talked seriously about trying to bring in Sundar Pichai, the current C.E.O. of Google.

But, in the end, Dorsey was the only credible option with the authority to revive Twitter. No one should envy him for getting the job. Dorsey's return is not unlike that of Steve Huffman, the co-founder of Reddit who has come back to lead his bloodied, unhappy company.

So why is Dorsey returning? In part, it's surely emotional. A startup founder has a tough time giving up on his creation, even after he's been ousted. I have known the entire cast of characters at Twitter from its genesis, and no one has been more passionate about the company than Dorsey. Still, the challenges are immense: in response to a question about the role of a founder, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has said, “The social capital and moral authority that comes from being the founder and having built many of the company’s key products means that, on balance, people trust you more and give you the benefit of the doubt.” But, he added, “these are clear advantages that founders may have, but they don’t guarantee success.”

Twitter has many self-inflicted wounds. Anil Dash, a well-known technologist and essayist, rightfully believes that things started to go awry in 2010, when its focus shifted from working closely with third-party developers to competing with them. Outside coders who built products to improve Twitter soon found the company trying to crush them. The company focussed on celebrities and cool people, displaying a distinct lack of caring for developers, whose trust it gradually lost. (Interestingly, Twitter retains a reputation for being less developer-friendly than Facebook, even though Facebook has not been shy at all about destroying the dreams of those who have helped to built its platform.)

To understand why developers and a company’s platform approach are important, let me outline a simple scenario. A week ago, I fell victim to a seasonal attack of the flu. I decided that I was going to take a break from social media, so I deleted all social apps from my phone and iPad. It has been six days since I logged into Twitter, but there have been multiple other apps that required me to use my Facebook credentials to log in. Facebook, it seems, is now core to the mobile Web experience. Twitter had the same opportunity; in fact, for a brief period, it had more good will among developers, privacy advocates, and general Web users. I still trust it more than Facebook or Google, and yet it has lost its “must have” status in my mobile life.

What does Twitter still have? Last week, Ben Thompson, a prominent technology analyst and consultant, lauded Twitter's Moments feature, which the company recently launched, on his blog, Stratechery. It is essentially a stream of text, photos, and videos that adds up to “What's News” on Twitter. It is not algorithmic but has been put together by editors. “Twitter just reinvented the newspaper. It’s not just any newspaper though — it has the potential to be the best newspaper in the world,” Thompson wrote, exultantly, about Moments.

I like it, too, but, boy, does it need some rethinking—the visual dissonance between Moments and the Twitter Stream is deeply unsettling. For comparison, look at how Facebook profiles, feeds, and pages look very much in sync from a design standpoint, seamlessly shifting from one to another. The disconnect between Moments and Twitter Stream is evidence of a company that has been lazy in its product thinking. Dorsey has to overhaul that feature, making sure his employees are always thinking from users' point of view. Square's products have that coherence, which you also see in Apple products. Twitter is in urgent need of that kind of invisible fluidity among its offerings.

That's not all it needs. For the past few years, I have seen Twitter's workforce balloon to more than four thousand people, even though the company failed to innovate or raise its total number of monthly users. Its product updates were sloppy, at best. Sure, the company built up an impressive advertising infrastructure, but, without a healthy platform, it isn't of much use. Facebook has about nine thousand employees and will make more than two billion dollars in profit this year. Twitter had more than four thousand employees and revenues of more than two billion dollars.

Dorsey had to know, coming into the job, that he would need to fire a lot of people. And he did—on Tuesday, Twitter cut eight per cent of its workforce, and I wouldn't be surprised if it trims the numbers further. For anyone who has to lay off employees—perhaps for a founder in particular—it is a painful, soul-searing process. In a memo to his staff, Dorsey explained why it had to be done. Sometimes firing is done just for financial reasons, but in this case there seemed to be deeper concerns.

“You don’t normally see job cuts at this early stage for growth companies unless there is something materially going wrong with the operations or the strategy,” Mark Mahaney, an Internet analyst at RBC Capital Markets, told the Times. That is an understatement, to say the least. Twitter, like many companies in Silicon Valley, confused the growth of its workforce with the growth of the company: for the past couple of years, it has been on a somewhat inexplicable hiring binge. My translation of the Twitter cuts is that the company had too much fat, was moving too slowly, and was too bogged down by bureaucracy. What Twitter needs is smaller, more focussed, more nimble teams.