My shadow, following a trail of competent people.

A turning point in Tucson

Why things feel new at Medium’s latest offsite in Tucson, Arizona

I had a plan to dump all my photos here, inspired by Jeremy Puma’s great photo share from our recent Medium company offsite at Tanque Verde Ranch. But as I put the post together I realized it told a bigger story, and there was color to be added about where we are at as a company. I left Tucson with so much gratitude and optimism for Medium’s future and I wanted to share why.

I’ve been at Medium for just over a year, a year in which we’ve seen a lot of change (some good, some tough). We’ve made changes to how we work, we’ve aligned around operating principles and a refined mission and vision, we’ve shipped more features and product updates than ever, we’ve handed the big responsibility of product ownership to our designers and engineers, we have keener clarity around our business goals and how we measure success, and—as if that wasn’t enough—we’ve recently added two new roles to our executive team, VP of Growth and VP of Engineering, both of which will deepen our strategic and execution work even further.

We’ve also parted ways with some very good humans over the course of the last year. We wouldn’t be where we are today without their contributions, not culturally or product or otherwise. Sometimes they left work in their wake that we had to…