Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) SVP Bryan Lamkin — who oversaw the company’s communications products, including Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger, as well as its communities products, such as Flickr and Yahoo Answers — leaving the company after a year on the job — the latest top executive to exit the company recently. Lamkin — who had previously spent 14 years at Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE) — was one of CEO Carol Bartz’s first high-profile hires. He had played a role in several of Yahoo’s recent acquisitions, including its purchase of social sports startup Citizen Sports and e-mail startup Xoopit, as well as its recent broad partnership with Twitter. Yahoo tells us that Lamkin is leaving to “pursue a new entrepreneurial venture.”
Likely not a coincidence: Lamkin is leaving only a week after the company announced the hiring of former Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) executive Blake Irving to be its chief product officer. TechCrunch — which first reported Lamkin’s departure says that Lamkin wanted the chief product officer job.
Irving himself is replacing CTO and EVP of products Ari Balogh, who said this month he was leaving for “personal reasons.” Other senior executives to leave over the last two months include EVP for product architecture and strategy Ash Patel, chief technologist Sam Pullara and sales chief Joanne Bradford. That seems like an awful lot of turnover, despite what Bartz might say about the interest in executive departures at her company being “borderline strange.”
We’ve reached out to Yahoo to get more details and will update with what we learn.

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