Joining Medium’s Design Team

Why I’m excited to join Medium as the new head of design

Soon I’ll join Medium to support their existing team of six insanely talented brand and product designers. I really could not be more excited about it all, and though I have a number of things to do in my personal life beforehand, I can’t stop thinking about getting started.

Although it’s not unheard of in tech by any means, I find it impressive that a product as big and impactful as Medium — with a million paying subscribers — is run today by less than 80 people and just a handful of designers. I’m excited about that, because in tech fewer people often means less bureaucracy and a greater ability to move nimbly and deliberately. I’m a builder at heart; I want to get things done. It’s often easier to do that with smaller teams.

I’ve also always felt culturally aligned with this company and, as so many people in my network have noted, it seems like “such a great fit”! But why such a great fit? If you don’t know me yet, that seems worth digging into.

Comments from people who know me on LinkedIn

A long and storied legacy (or, why I care)

First, because I’m certain my mom will read this, and because a lot of other people I talk to don’t know what Medium is, I want to explain what the platform does and why I believe it’s such an important product. Let me start at the beginning.

Medium began in 2012 as a means for anyone to publish their thoughts, ideas and experiences for anyone to read. I consider myself one of its early extollers and writers, publishing my first pieces here in 2013 and advocating for everyone I knew to use it too. Today, Medium content skews heavily toward subject-matter expertise, but some of my favorite pieces have also been personal essays and memoir. Anything from Human Parts is a treasure and a gift.

I see Medium as a blank page platform, where creators are limited only by the stories they wish to tell. Across the world, content here is unique, and readers come here to dig deep into a subject, to find out more about the human experience, or to write and publish their stories in a personal, direct-to-audience space, as well as to reach larger audiences.

A slide from my interview deck. I’ve been following Medium since Teehan+Lax (RIP) posted their case study about working with Medium in 2012

Medium was the first to make it joyful to publish articles that are beautiful and easy to consume. This foundational devotion to user experience, getting the essentials right, has made it stand out over the years amongst other reading and writing platforms. Then when Medium introduced a paywall authors could choose to put their work behind, their great innovation was facilitating micropayments that allowed writers to be financially compensated based on how much their audience interacted with their piece.

All of this matters to me personally for a number of reasons:

1. I believe in lowering the barrier to entry for publishing, and democratizing whose stories get to be told and heard. Before he died my dad did lots of things to make a living, but the thing he did consistently throughout the years was write poetry. His identity centered around being a poet, and he was talented. He was so proud of getting to shake the hand of Allen Ginsberg in the 70s. Proud of the lit mag he started in Orlando. But, he struggled to get published by top tier journals. The world wasn’t very open to his passion. Today, it doesn’t have to be that way.
2. I love the innovation of Medium’s payment solution for writers. I’ve experienced firsthand the discrepancy between how hard writing is versus how much writers are compensated for their work. Even well-intentioned publishers might pay $10 for a poem or $50 for a story, or less, and that is just the publishers who are committed to paying writers (many don’t). When thinking of how much time goes into perfecting a piece, this is a wild gap that usually works out to a less than minimum wage rate. So while Medium isn’t the be-all-end-all solution to ‘pay writers what they’re worth’, and it isn’t intended to be, I love to see new opportunities for writers to get paid. I also love the mutually beneficial incentives here: the more successful Medium is as a product and company, the better for writers too.
3. A company with a deep legacy of respect for design and usability has amazing foundations to build on. I’m eager to stand on the shoulders of people I’ve deeply respected in the design world for many years who have worked here. At the same time, the constraints in place around the company’s target audience and current strategy (along with everything they’ve tried and learned in years prior) will allow us to design the next meaningful evolution of Medium.

I think this company is great for other reasons too. My years at Lattice gave me an appreciation for how much it takes to make a business sustainable, and I really appreciate the nuts and bolts approach that Tony Stubblebine (Medium CEO) and his leadership team have taken the past two years to stabilize Medium’s business.

Culturally, I also believe the internet can be a thriving, energizing, equalizing force in the world. It started out that way and though we’ve gone astray, as I wrote in 2019 I believe we can get back there again.

Tony wrote about this recently too with a more pointed call to join the effort.

Be part of a better internet

We have a long way to go, though, and design (alongside content, product, engineering, etc.) has a huge role to play. Some of the questions on my mind:

• Creativity: How can we preserve and celebrate human creativity in the age and deluge of AI-generated content?
• Quality: How can we design systems to surface content that moves us forward, that challenges us and deepens our understanding of how people and the world work?
• Inclusion: How can we build experiences that make it easier for unheard voices to express themselves and share their stories?
• Responsibility: How do we ensure the systems we design online are not used intentionally for harm, disinformation, and manipulation?

I’m writing this of my own accord before officially onboarding at Medium, so everything I know to-date is from my limited conversations and what I’ve managed to poke around and find online. There is no insider baseball here, and I’m really excited about how much I have to learn from the smart people tackling these questions long before me.

What I plan to do first

Learn how it works today

First, I’m eager to get in there and figure out how the product and teams operate today. I want to get up to speed with how the teams think about quality and how these mechanisms play out in future iterations of Medium. Undoubtedly there are technical and UX considerations I need to fully wrap my head around.

Meet Medium’s customers

As a customer-driven designer and leader, I also want to understand how people are using Medium today and where the biggest opportunities are for our audiences. My own Medium community has been pretty organic, and I am excited to use the product more intentionally to get to know Medium’s wider cohort of readers, writers, and publishers (do say hello, I’d love to meet you!).

Get to know new colleagues

Critical to making the above insights turn into anything productive, I also want to connect with my new colleagues — the people who make things happen at Medium. My favorite part of working in tech is the cohort of ambitious, often idealistic people I get to know and spend my days with. Everything I’ve seen so far tells me my new colleagues are thoughtful and discerning, and I can’t wait to geek out together in the trenches.

What I know I don’t know

I’m sure Medium is much bigger than I can even imagine right now; it always is when you see it anew from its inner workings. From Obama publishing his statement on Biden’s announcement on Medium, to the daily (hourly) behind-the-scenes work of the Content and Trust and Safety teams, and considering Medium’s role in society-at-large, I know there is a learning curve ahead for me to more closely familiarize myself with this world. I’ll rely heavily on my new colleagues and team to ensure I can make good decisions with the pertinent information, and I pledge I’ll do my best to catch up quickly.

Wish list

There are a few things I wish for from my time at Medium.

1. Synchronicity — I want, both selfishly and strategically, a tight team. I want designers who care about and trust each other. Engineers and PMs and designers who enjoy each other’s company because we are building toward a shared purpose. Brand, product and content telling the same root story. I know I’ll find joy in alignment and helping all the different parts hum together in one tune.
2. Evolution — My impression is that Medium at its core has been the same product for several years. How do we give readers and writers tools to achieve Medium’s mission —to deepen our collective understanding of the world through the power of writing — that are appropriate for today’s context? I want to help build the next generation of Medium, the version that will keep this team kicking and meeting the moment for many years to come.
3. Impact — I’d love our team to care enormously about the impact of what we are building, to prioritize the quality of what we build, to encourage and challenge each other, and to ultimately do bigger things together than we could ever do alone. This will take focus (not doing too many things) and a commitment to quality (doing them to our highest ability).

I’m excited to be working on a product that is so close to my heart and my passions. Getting to combine work with what I love to do is a privilege that I don’t want to waste. If you work at Medium and have things you want to send my way before I start, please do, I am chomping at the bit! I look forward to meeting you all and really getting to know you in just a couple short weeks’ time.