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Orient for Human Impact
Or: What I told the Medium Engineering team after a really painful org transition
I’m clearing out some old drafts! This one is originally from March 2025, during Medium’s spring offsite in Newport, RI. The company had recently undergone a painful transition, and I shared this message with the Engineering team as part of our time together in-person as a whole department.
It’s great advice that holds up, no matter what you and your team are going through or trying to build.
If the theme of our last offsite in Scotland was laddering, the theme of this offsite is orienting for impact. So far, we’ve focused on orienting for impact in terms of KPIs, growth, and metrics — essentially, business impact.
Business impact is no small or easy thing. At the end of the day, our job is to drive Medium’s success, having impact not just by launching features or completing individual projects, but also by contributing to the company’s long-term goals.
Within the realm of business impact, there are more subtle forms we sometimes overlook. For instance, consider the work that the core platform team are doing to improve the local dev environment. It might not immediately grow our active member base, but reducing developer onboarding time and devProd frustrations helps…
