Opening a new Principal Product Designer Role at Medium

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Opening a New Principal Product Designer Role at Medium

We’re looking for a new super senior designer to join our excellent team. Here’s more about what the job entails.

Today we are opening a new Principal Product Designer role at Medium — our most senior design level and an IC leadership position at the company.

Adding new leadership to a team involves both risk and reward. That’s why I’m writing this: I want to outline my hopes and expectations for this role as well as illustrate the immense, rare opportunity to shape the future of Medium. We know success for this role depends on finding someone whose experience and interests align perfectly. Somewhere out there is a person reading this who’s nodding along, maybe even saying aloud, “That sounds exactly like me. I can help with that. I want that!”

That’s who I want to find: someone who knows Medium, appreciates our mission, and has the skills to deepen our design work. Is that you? By all means, apply, and tell us in your cover letter why you’re the perfect fit for this role. Yes, a human being will be reading your cover letter.

Why now?

During my six months at Medium so far, what has become clear to me are our tremendous opportunities for growth. We spent the past two years stabilizing our business and reaching profitability, and our team is now ready to take on more creative risks and holistic systems changes that shape how Medium fundamentally works. In other words: our footing is sound; what’s next?

Our day-to-day work (especially as designers) should be fun, and this work sounds fun to me. It is high impact and high reward, has super interesting challenges to consider, and you get to build on your craft alongside colleagues whose skills and integrity are unmatched. This is a very, very good group of humans who I hope this role will serve well. I want the right person reading this to be equally invested in discovering a connection with this much potential.

Small team, big ambitions

We’re a small team — I want to make that clear because sometimes the reach of our brand makes people think we are bigger than we are — but what we lack in size we make up for in ambition. Altogether our company is just under 80 people, along with a handful of contractors. Our design team has six people, seven counting me: one brand designer, four product designers, and a researcher. Like many companies our size our team skews senior; we have four senior designers, one staff level, and one other principal product designer. I am currently the only design manager so all designers, including this role, report to me. I report to our head of engineering, product and design, Luke Millar. I am also a member of our executive team of five that meets with the board and works with the rest of our leadership team to set company direction.

What you’ll work on

At Medium, we believe in the power of writing and publishing, how it can help clarify ideas and beliefs, how it can stir movement and change, how it can connect people to meaningful community. I’ve felt that impact personally over the course of my career, and the right person for this role has probably felt that too. That’s the big picture.

We are building better systems for people all over the world to feel the power of a well-expressed idea that reaches the right people at the right time. Those connections can change lives for the better.

On the more granular level, there is no shortage of projects we can tackle. Some of these will be principal level design challenges, others will be simply chipping in and working with high agency to make everything work better. Examples include auditing and designing interconnected systems for notifications, finding new ways to organize and help members discover our “great library” of content, or more holistically painting the vision for Medium’s unique value prop of “social publishing.”

We are already working on many of these things (and more), but your work will make us stronger. You will help us build and maintain a culture of excellence by designing and building experimental prototypes, measuring the impact of our work, learning as we go, and all those other things listed in the job description.

How you’ll work

There are two pieces of this that feel important or setting this role up for success.

1. Being product-minded is critical to your success at Medium. You’ll work directly with other designers, engineers, and leadership to plan, realize, and measure the impact of your work. Because we are a small team we operate like a startup, which means that direct working teams do change and that sometimes all hands on deck are required. The person who fills this role will be equally comfortable mapping out a strategy with leadership as they will be relishing the detailed, hands-on execution of their work alongside Engineering and Content.
2. The development of individuals on my team is extremely important to me, since that is the part of the employment bargain that, as a manager, is up to me to uphold. Sometimes designers at the highest levels in a company are left to fend for themselves. They are often working on the most complex, ambiguous problems in the business and expected to operate with a high degree of autonomy. On my team, that will be true too, but you will always have my support and advocacy, even when I am challenging you at the same time. I promise to push you. That’s my job, and I expect you to hold me to the same standard. Managers and ICs need to work together as a team and that means listening, negotiating, and acting within a high trust environment.

How we make decisions

I want to share a little more about how we make decisions at Medium because I know that will matter to the right person for this role. In short, our CEO, Tony Stubblebine, and Head of Product, Luke Millar, are closely involved in the work, as am I and all our managers at this small company stage. We know our product very well and take pride in being a hands-on product leadership team. We try hard to avoid the typical things that we all hated about working with leadership that ‘didn’t get it’ at other points in our careers — things like false urgency, fire drills, or drive-by critiques, but to honor that we expect good-spirited collaboration above isolated heroism. You will also work closely with your cross-functional product teams, because good ideas can come from everywhere.

As a company we meet up twice a year to complete our roadmapping, and since we are fully remote we tend to choose a different location each time. Last year we met up in Scotland. This March we are headed to Newport, Rhode Island. We are definitely still figuring a lot out about our operational efficiencies and we’d like you to help us shape them, but there are some good ideas in the pipeline for how to create more clarity and efficacy. Our offsites are critical times at which the whole company gets together to hash out our biggest challenges and ideally, you are right there with us.

Who you are

The job description outlines the characteristics of someone we think would fit well into this role, but I’d like to use this space to reiterate a couple of things.

1. This is both a deep systems and high craft role. Being a small team, we’d like an experienced designer to be able to work at different fidelities of design problems, and in different areas of the business depending on need. Usually, to meet the expectations of this role, you’ll likely have already worked for some time as either a Staff or Principal level designer at a similar type of company. There aren’t many design challenges you won’t have seen some version of in your working history. Some experience in consumer-facing products, particularly working on a social or community-based platform, will give you a leg up in solving many of our specific challenges.
2. But we aren’t looking for someone to repeat history. We want a designer who thinks deeply, often outside the box, who isn’t afraid to take risks, and who knows when to use existing patterns and when to innovate. This person should be industry-aware and can both reflect our level of ambitions back to us while at the same elevating the potential of our plans. You’ll make us all smarter.

Is this you?

I hope this level of transparency is something that excites you as much as it does me. It’s a characteristic of my brand of leadership that I feel lucky enough to be able to exercise at Medium. If it didn’t get your gears turning though, that’s alright, we’d still love you to follow along with our design team at Medium. We expect big things over the next year and it’s helpful just to have community to connect and share with along our journey.

But if you saw this story pop up, started reading, and got more excited the more you read because you saw yourself in our design ethos and in what we hope to achieve, we would absolutely love to hear from you.

Please apply, and let us know what you hope to bring to the table.

Opening a new Principal Product Designer Role at Medium was originally published in Medium.design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.