Medium product improvement: choose a goal, a user segment and a first release

Medium is an online publishing platform: anyone can write and publish stories, and readers find them through topics, the writers and publications they follow, and links shared across the web. Imagine you are a product manager on Medium. How would you improve the product? Decide what to improve and for whom, propose solutions, choose what to build first, and explain how you would know it worked. ```hint Two sides of one platform Medium only works when readers find stories worth their time and writers find an audience. Pick which side's problem you will solve first, and say how solving it also helps the other side. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Is the priority reader engagement, paid membership growth, or writer success and retention? - Should I focus on readers, writers, or a narrower group such as people who land on a single story from a search result or a shared link? - Should the improvement target the website, the mobile apps, or both? - Must the improvement work within a membership-funded model, or is adding advertising on the table? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A goal tied to how Medium creates value and makes money, chosen before any features. - A segmentation of readers and writers with a reasoned choice of one segment to serve first. - Pain points of that segment turned into concrete solutions and prioritized into a focused first release. - Success metrics with guardrails that protect content quality, writer earnings and membership. - Risks and trade-offs between the reader and writer sides of the platform. ### Follow-up Questions - Your change raises stories read per session, but writers' earnings stay flat. What would you investigate? - How would you keep low-quality or mass-produced AI-written stories from benefiting from your recommendations? - How would you test a change near the paywall without hurting membership conversion?