Uber Technologies Inc. hired Jeff Jones, chief marketing officer at Target Corp., as president, ridesharing. Jones will be responsible for Uber’s operations, marketing and customer support globally.

Uber CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick made the announcement Tuesday in a blog post.

Jones replaces Ryan Graves, an early Uber employee. Graves will continue to be integrally involved with Uber as its resident entrepreneur and builder.

“This will include bringing his unique brand of optimistic leadership to our People Operations, helping to build uberEVERYTHING (EATS, RUSH, and others) with Jason Droege, and working with me on a number of upcoming strategic projects,” Kalanick said in the blog post.

“Over the last six months, Ryan and I have become increasingly convinced that our rapidly growing marketing efforts needed to be far more integrated with our city operations,” Kalanick wrote. “Marketing is about storytelling, about attracting, engaging and retaining customers. Of course, a majority of our city operations are focused on exactly that, but those efforts have been isolated from many of our marketing functions. Our vision is simple: to redefine how a large operations effort can be tightly integrated with a customer-obsessed marketing strategy.”

Kalanick and Jones met in February at TED. “It’s super clear to me that Jeff understands scale, operational excellence, innovation and storytelling — and that he’s up for learning and testing his limits,” Kalanick wrote. “Most of all I love Jeff’s optimism about, and enthusiasm for, our mission.”

Uber’s top ranks are dominated by loyalists, and the company has had some trouble retaining senior talent hired from the outside, Bloomberg reported. Many executives on the operations team started off overseeing single cities for Uber.