The Sauce

The sauce is only a handful of ingredients. It doesn’t matter the exact number, just that it’s a few. The sauce is simple. But the sauce is hard.

1. Tomato
2. Onion
3. Garlic
4. Salt

At random moments, since I was a toddler, my mom would be cooking, and I would be somewhere nearby, and she would pop quiz me and it would go something like this:

“What goes in the sauce?”

“Tomato, onion, garlic, salt.”

“And what if you want to cook the sauce with meat?”

“Add cumin.”

“Why?”

“…I don’t know…I forgot.”

“Because it just tastes better with meat. But not when you are making rice, and not as a raw salsa. When do you have to fry the sauce?”

“I don’t know.”

“When you are making salsa for tacos…and you feel like it. When should we roast the tomatoes, when should we boil them, and when should we put them in raw?”

“…I don’t know, stop asking me all these questions.”

“When you just want it to taste really good.”

Eventually the sauce became my job, and she started telling me more ambiguous things like this:

“…did you forget the salt?”

“…I don’t know.”

“You didn’t put enough salt this time. Why didn’t you taste it?”

“I was afraid it wouldn’t taste good.”

“You have to taste the food, or else you’ll never learn.”

Salting the food, even though I know how that can make or break the sauce, was the hardest part of figuring out how to cook in a family that didn’t believe in the notion of a recipe.

I spent years demanding the recipe. I’d call my mom when I was in college and ask things like, “Hey, can you text me your recipe for chiles rellenos?” And my mom would just answer, “Oh that’s super easy! All you do is fhwieufhwiuhfwouehfwiuehfwi, you know, the sauce.”

“Yeah but like, how do I know if it’s right, how do I know what to put in, or how much? Didn’t you at one point start from a recipe? Can you at least write it down for me?” And sometimes she would try, but I could tell in her voice and her reaction that she had both conveyed it all to me over years and years, and that whatever she was about to write down in 1–2 sentences max was not going to do her, or the food, any justice.

So eventually I gave up, and maybe I gave up on other parts of our relationship too.

But what stayed was the sauce. All the good memories and potential and things I knew I had to not forget to be grateful about. The understanding that things are never perfect but you can keep trying and one day be surprised. The love.

I make a tally in my mind every time I make the sauce as a way to remember that, and a way to understand the meaning of mastering a craft. I know I have made this sauce thousands of times. The point isn’t that I’ve memorized the recipe, it’s that it never was the goal to achieve. The sauce was. Every now and again I screw up the sauce because I rushed this and that, usually. Sometimes, I didn’t think about the person and made it too spicy or not spicy enough. Usually though, no one at the table cares. No food is wasted.

If there’s ever silence at the table, I know I made a really good one.

Sometimes when this happens I do write stuff down. I have no intent of guarding anything, just documenting delight. I did something, the results were good, and I was present enough to notice.

“What did you do?” Only a few people bother to ask, and that’s fine. I’m always happy to share or teach. The more good sauce, the better for all.

Once or twice I’ve gotten the chance to serve my mom and dad something, and they’ve asked me the questions.

“¿Esto te quedó muy bien, que le pusiste?

“I wondered why we always kept them raw in this instead of roasting them, even though roasted tastes better. So I started doing it.”

“Ah, pues a mí siempre me ha gustado mucho tu comida.”

One of the sources of optimism for me about this AI era is the way that we‘ve run out of excuses to build the best quality products for our users.

The value of high-quality design, however you describe it—craft, usability, polish, delight, taste—is rarely disputed on its own. But against the context of finite time and people, or business priorities and pressures, we know it routinely gets left behind. It’s one of the first lessons that every designer learns on the job.

Even at a place like Medium, where we have good business and user reasons to do it, we haven’t had a pixel-perfect track record. Ten years ago, a user wrote about how we didn’t have a dark mode, and even did us the favor of getting something started, but we just never got to it.

Until now! Sorry we’re late! We know ten years is a long time, but hey, we’re able to laugh about it:

Check out Christine Leverett’s post on the Medium Engineering blog about how she and Sophie Aguado from the design team made it happen. Along with our official Medium Blog post, they’re fun reads on how we friend-zoned the feature off the roadmap for so long.

Let us know what else we could do to make you love long-form reading on the internet, and thank you for noticing the other stuff we’ve gotten out the door this year.

Last bit—a little bit of Median trivia—our main user feedback feed in Slack was affectionally nicknamed “the dark mode channel” and I’m quick to believe that it had a quiet yet patient hand in all of this. What should we nickname it next?

Dark Mode for Medium was originally published in Medium.design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Career ladders: fix them or throw them out?

A few weeks ago, Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Jen Dionisio, the wonderful women behind Active Voice and the Throughline Conf (which you should get tickets for) asked me to join a panel on design career ladders. Now, of all the things I’ve got spicy thoughts about in this industry (and these ladies are one of the few that have unfiltered access to such thoughts), I admit this isn’t one that was top of mind.

So that was 80% of why I said yes on the spot. Throughline doesn’t do spon con; they stick to real talk. They’ve been a leading voice in not just what’s going on in design right now, but what’s coming up ahead. Not dwelling in the past that won’t return; they choose to focus on what gives us agency for the future instead. I knew it would be a provocative discussion.

The other 20% of why I said yes was because I knew that career ladders are a manifestation of something deeper. Designer roles are changing faster than most orgs’ career ladders can keep up with. Responsibilities blur, titles stop meaning what they used to, and the things we need from a designer this year look different from last year. When the ladder falls behind, people pay for it. Expectations get fuzzy, good work goes unrecognized, and promotion conversations start to feel arbitrary.

What you’ll take away from this panel

Joining me are two other design leaders, Shelby Bower and Shani Jayant. Together, we’ll get into questions like:

• What’s the right balance of equity and flexibility? How might we foster flexibility in each person’s career? Why might some things be firm expectations?
• What checks and balances help businesses and leaders apply a framework fairly in performance, compensation, and promotion conversations?
• As a designer working within these systems, how much energy do you want to spend on what an employer (or the broader design industry) defines versus doing work that matters to you?

It’s free to attend

Kick off your Halloween weekend and tune in next Friday, October 30, 2026. It’s from 12–1pm EST.

https://www.throughlineconf.com/events/loose-threads-october2026

Then get some tickets to Througline 2026, seriously

RIP An Event Apart—I personally am still searching for that indie conf vibe in my life, but it’s really hard to make those things happen. If you want to make those happen too, the best thing you can do is support virtual events and help get a community going. If Throughline ever goes IRL I’ll be there in a heartbeat!

Throughline tix here: https://www.throughlineconf.com/2027

Today we are starting a search for a Staff Product Designer to join Medium— a role that we need to help us solve some of the hardest, most ambitious parts of our company vision, mission, and strategy.

Bringing on a new designer onto a small team brings both risk and opportunity. A design team is more than the sum of its parts. A product is more than the sum of its parts. At this stage of your design career, so are you. As someone who leads through craft, you are entrusted to make every part of the product—and every person around you—better.

What’s more, designing for Medium carries a legacy of setting and upholding an unmistakably high bar for design quality in service of reading and writing. We achieve that not just through skill and taste, but by treasuring long-form reading in our personal lives and maintaining writing practices of our own.

I took a good long time to write this job description not because we’re a reading and writing company, but because I want the next person who joins our team, and anyone who invests their time and craft in our process, to know the following:

1. We rarely hire for the design team at Medium. This role exists because we are doing ambitious things. When we say we value design here, we mean it.
2. Your experience and potential will be valued and invested in. When we say that we want you to do your best, most rewarding work here, we mean it.
3. We believe in the power of writing. When we talk about the kind of place we want to build and work for, we actually mean it.

Does this sound like you? If you’re on here reading this, that’s a good start. Check out the rest of the job description below. If you dig it, please apply. The Medium is the message, and we’d like to hear your voice.

Staff Product Designer

🌐 Remote — US

About Medium

Medium is one of the world’s most influential writing platforms, connecting millions of readers with ideas that matter. We’re a small, dedicated team that cares deeply and takes real ownership of the problems we tackle, moving fast while building something that lasts. Our actions and decision-making are guided by four principles: Humans First, Deepen Understanding, Orient for Impact, and Ladder Together.

Design is a vital discipline at Medium. We have a long, visible history of raising the design bar for reading and writing on the internet. We continue to believe that by radically redefining the experience of reading and writing online, we foster humans-first spaces that showcase individual voices and stories.

Today, Medium is a profitable and independently-funded company. This has enabled us to embark on a new era that requires us to think big and explore uncharted territory. If you want to join and shape the future of reading and writing with urgency, care, and play, come help us build what’s next!

The Role

At Medium, designers and engineers work across the full range of the product development process. We’re looking for someone who lives and breathes reading and writing, not just someone who’s designed a lot of software. As a Staff Product Designer on the team, you’ll report to the Director of Product Design and work on multiple projects from ideation to launch.

As part of a product team, you’ll orient your work towards high-impact opportunities. You’ll execute on product strategy by pitching what gets built, shaping its scope, and planning how it gets done. You will own and create high-quality design work that transforms those priorities into simple, intuitive solutions that you ship alongside your team.

As a member of the design organization, you’ll collaborate with engineering to uphold a quality bar with your design instincts, visual design sensibility, attention to detail, and taste. With your design teammates, you are someone who welcomes feedback, isn’t precious about your work, and elevates everyone’s impact through collaboration.

As a Median, you’ll be someone who embodies our operating principles and demonstrates empathy and resilience. You’ll demonstrate empathy for our users, to build a platform and products they’ll love. As a teammate, you’ll demonstrate empathy for your coworkers, to contribute to a workplace we love, and the resilience to be able to take feedback from anywhere, consider it gracefully, and fold it into your thinking and work.

What You’ll Do

• Collaborate closely with other engineers, designers, and leadership to translate product strategy and complex challenges into well-defined product initiatives.
• Own and execute high-quality designs, interactions, and prototypes that distill a product vision into tangible experiences for our users.
• Leverage AI design tools and workflows effectively to create artifacts that explore and validate new ideas, features, and interactions.
• Contribute to our design system to ensure a cohesive and scalable visual language across the product.
• Conduct user research to uncover pain points and opportunities, using insights to inform design decisions.
• Represent the design team by upholding a high design bar, working with your teammates to make thoughtful, intentional decisions at every step.

What You Have

• 7+ years of experience designing products in a fast-paced environment working closely with engineering, design, and product teammates to develop the strategy and rationale for features.
• An outstanding portfolio with presentable case studies of your best work, showcasing a foundation in typography, interaction and visual design, and idea generation for work you’ve shipped.
• The ability to tackle complex challenges and transform them into simple, intuitive experiences.
• The ability to change altitude from design details to big picture thinking, while maintaining a high pace of execution and quality bar.
• An understanding of design systems, including an understanding of how and why the field has evolved and a point of view on what comes next.
• A learning and growth mindset. We’re a small team. Our shape and process will evolve and change many times over the next few years. We strive to continuously improve, iterate, and integrate what we learn — from our work and each other.
• Excellent written, verbal, and storytelling skills. We are a reading and writing company, after all!

Interview Process

We go through the same interview steps for all Product Design candidates to instill equity in our hiring process. Our process is designed to learn as much about each candidate, as well as to give candidates a way to learn about what it’s like to work at Medium. Topics will range from previous work experiences, problem-solving, and collaboration approaches, to technical skills.

1. First-round phone call with a Medium recruiter.
2. 30-minute phone call with the hiring manager.
3. 60-minute portfolio presentation with a cross-functional panel of people you’d work with. We ask that you present 2 case studies of your best work that convey why you want to join Medium, plus 1 adjacent mini case to share other design skills or work you think make you the right fit.
4. 45-minute realtime design collaboration exercise with a member of the product design team.
5. 1:1 interviews with peers and leaders at Medium:

• 30 minutes with an engineer on the hiring team.
• 30 minutes with the VP of Product and Design.

1. Wrap-up call with recruiting.

Benefits

In addition to the new experiences you’ll pick up, here’s what else you’ll enjoy by working at Medium:

• Working with a fully distributed team: We’re fully remote and have teammates across the U.S. & France
• Healthcare benefits covered at 100% for employees and 80% for dependents
• Generous parental leave policy
• Twice a year company off-sites
• Mental health support through Spring Health (or find a provider through Rula or Kaiser Mental Health Network)
• Financial wellness support through Northstar
• Stipends for co-working, professional development, wifi, and a one-time home office bonus
• Unlimited PTO and standard company holidays
• A discounted Medium membership

Why Medium

At Medium, inclusion, diversity, and equity are core to how we work and what we build. We believe a more inclusive team creates a better product — one that’s intuitive, thoughtful, and serves a wide range of users. We strive to foster a supportive, fun, and challenging environment where people from all backgrounds can thrive.

We welcome applicants from all walks of life and strongly encourage those from historically underrepresented groups to apply. Our hiring process is built to ensure fairness and equal opportunity for everyone. Even if your experience doesn’t match every requirement, we’d still love to hear from you — your perspective and passion matter more than checking every box. We actively track representation across our hiring pipelines and hold ourselves accountable to building inclusively.

Learn more about our mission, operating principles, and culture:

• Yes to a diverse community
• Be part of a better internet
• Medium Rules
• Operating Principles

Read about our story here.

Read our guidance on AI use for candidates. We believe human ideas have the power to change how people think, for the better. That belief shapes how we hire. We use AI tools ourselves, but we’ve thought carefully about where it adds value and where it gets in the way of something important.

Apply directly on Greenhouse 👉 here.

We’re looking for a Staff Product Designer to join the Medium team was originally published in Medium.design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Medium Day 2026 is wrapped, but through the power of the internet, you can still partake. All of our sessions are recorded and available for free, on-demand, until Halloween night PST. Yes, “Halloween night” is a time and date, arguably more contextual than saying Oct 31, 2026 11:45 PM EST.

If you’re here on the Medium Design blog, chances are you want to re-watch our Trunk Show or know how it went. Well, no one messed up. Everyone finished their slides on time. Absolutely no awkward silences were had. I believe we also had no one ask, “Can everyone see my screen?” To me, that’s a huge success. Next year, we’ll do even more.

The audience made it a blast. We had prolific bloggers on the platform join the session — it’s always fun to see how people are in realtime versus their published stories. A big goal of mine for this session this year was to demonstrate to the audience just how human this team is. We take our work seriously and really do read through all the feedback emails that come through, all the feature requests, and genuinely empathize with each pain point and need. We’re also striving to build what we think comes next, beyond all that, in the world of reading and writing on the internet. I think it was good to give people transparency and context into how the product development process balances those two tensions in the Q&A.

To prove a point—did you know that our team nickname for the user feedback slack feed was “The Dark Mode Channel”?

We’re searching a new name for that one. Check out your profile menu, friends. We even put some new merch on the store to celebrate that one.

Other reasons to re-watch the Trunk Show:

• Our team as the Avengers jokes — who would each of us be?
• What Flannery O’Connor and Joan Didion have to do with our brand work.
• BTS “Behind the Scenes?” Or BTS…our team as kpop boy band?
• Emily Kelly is informed that she has an accent.
• jeremy kicks off Pumpkin Spice season.
• Craig Atallah Frost’s sound setup.
• Medium Design alumni Jason Combs crashes the call.

In all seriousness, watch the Trunk Show to get the story behind the story of these latest drops on our Medium Blog. 👉Link here.👈

Great sessions from Medians and other design leaders

Even at a conference that doesn’t brand itself as a tech conference, AI was everywhere at Medium Day. We had lots of sessions speak to the role that AI plays in people’s writing practice and how people are evolving away from a “the default is social” idea of the web to more community-oriented, private spaces. But we had a few excellent sessions from people in tech too. The encompassing theme was not backlash, but intention.

Here’s my favorite talk from a non-Median, Ana Sofia Gonzalez:

The Intentful method: A designer’s framework for using AI to accelerate your potential

On the design team, we had Nouf Aljowaysir pair up with J. Kim to bring you a behind the scenes look on how we build story recommendations you can trust:

Building story recommendations you can trust

Scott Batson, one of the engineers we collaborate with the most on the design team, gave a talk on all the new workflows we’ve shipped recently in service of making it easier for editors of publications to recruit, vet, and collaborate with writers.

Improving the lives of publication editors

Why reading and writing on the internet matters more than ever

The thing underneath all of these sessions, the Keynote, and the State of Writing Report is the same idea echoed from different perspectives: that in a world where readers assume what they’re reading might be AI, being visibly, specifically human is the differentiator. We’re not writing and reading because we’re nostalgic for an era of the web past. We’re not writing and reading because it’s going to land us that perfect role at the perfect company either, anymore. We’re doing it because it’s one of the only ways left to think out loud and mean it. To show you we’re human. Turns out that’s exactly what people are still hungry for.

If you’re a designer and missed Medium Day, here are your must-watch recordings was originally published in Medium.design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Medium Day is our biggest gathering of humans who love reading and writing around the world. It’s a full day of sessions spanning a diverse range of topics for writers and technologists alike, and it’s totally free. Grab your ticket here:

Medium Day · September 18, 2026

Design at Medium historically has done a session at Medium Day, and this year we’re trying something a little different. Medium’s about stories, and to me, when we talk about design, talk about the work, storytelling’s way more insightful and substantive than just a polished case study.

What’s more, our team spans a wide range of strengths and skillsets, just like the things we designed and built this year. So we’re doing a panel this year, and I’ll be facilitating.

Craig Atallah Frost joined the team right around the time I did last year. This year he helped define how writers get real control over how AI companies use their stories, and he’s now applying that same thinking to how Medium surfaces stories to human readers, not just machines.

Emily Kelly designed everything you’re seeing at Medium Day today — down to the last detail. We brand Medium Day with care — and there are a lot of sessions — she’s going to walk us through her process and inspiration for that system.

jeremy is driving the vision for TK, our social writing tool that opens up more broadly today. He’ll talk through how fast the product has evolved this year and what it’s actually like to design something that ships constantly.

Nouf Aljowaysir leads the design of our social layer. She’s also got a separate talk she’s giving later today about how Reposting and our new Activity Feed came to be — features built on a real bet about how people connect and rediscover writing on Medium, not just scroll past it.

👉 Her talk is later today, 2:00–2:30 EST / 12:00–12:30 PST

Sophie Aguado is doing a ton behind the scenes, but one of the many she shipped recently was Custom Footers a feature that hints at where Medium’s headed.

We’ll be joined by our VP of Product and Design, Cassie McDaniel, who insists on the spotlight not being on her, but I’ll find out a way to do it anyway because she’s an amazing leader.

👉 Tune in today! We go live at 11:00am EST / 9:00am PST

For those of you who came for the music—first, please say hello in the comments, lol. Second, check out the shiny new custom footer at the end of my story and let me know what else you might want to make your home on Medium feel your own. I’m pretty private online overall, but something most people at work and in my personal life know about me, is that I love electronica. It’s what I listen to when I need to get in flow and become one with my computer to design things. It’s one of the ways I even got into design in the first place.

Here and there I’ll be switching that button up to link to a mix I think is cool. But for today, as I felt the pre-speaker nerves creep up, I shook it off with some Felix da Housecat. I’m not from Chicago, but I’ve lived there temporarily and made as many trips into the city as I could as an undergrad at Notre Dame. I love Chicago—and I just gave away my answer to the pop quiz part of our design discussion today. Check us out!

Come to the Design Team Trunkshow at Medium Day 2026 was originally published in Medium.design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve kept an eye on Medium for many years, mostly through my work on other platforms that enable people to share and express themselves on the web. Honestly, never thought I’d work here, but then Cassie McDaniel joined? And then they started taking some spicy stances around AI? One thing led to another, I met the team, and the rest is history.

From starting out as a nerd building blogs by hand in the early aughts, to joining teams of people working on the future of what that became, I continue to be an optimist about writing and creative expression on the web. It’s hard to wash out the writer in me, even as I’ve let that atrophy for so many years in favor of pixels.

Thank you Cassie McDaniel/Tony Stubblebine/Medium team for such a warm welcome! It’s gonna be great.