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Cassie McDaniel: How Medium eliminated its PM function and started moving faster

·27 min·2 clips

Medium eliminated its PM function, and now they're moving faster than ever.

Cassie McDaniel puts the work first. Her opening point is plain: fast teams cannot spend the whole meeting protecting every designer's feelings from critique. Medium gives the conversation its stakes. The hosts connect McDaniel's view of craft, broader skill sets, and workflow experiments to Medium's choice to eliminate product management. They do not sell it as a magic trick. The intro says it may not fit every team, which is the right caveat. Speed is the appeal, but the episode keeps bumping into the harder part: Medium still has a design reputation to live up to, and thoughtful work still has to ship. The critique section is the sharpest stretch. One host goes back to college in the 90s, when professors could call out weak reasoning without being mean about it. That memory lands against a newer worry: students can hear feedback about the work and still feel like the comment is about them. McDaniel answers from what she sees now. She is not around students much, apart from an annual portfolio review at University of Central Florida, and her own team is more seasoned. Senior, principal, and staff designers tend to have thicker skin about critique. The host nudges back. Younger designers still show up across teams, and McDaniel admits she may need to get out more. The joke helps. Beneath it is the useful problem: how a design team builds resilience without turning critique into a license to be careless with people.

As heard by us

A sharp, practical look at Medium's no-PM experiment and the design habits that help teams move faster.

Medium's move to eliminate product management gives this Design Better episode its business edge. Cassie McDaniel, Medium's head of design, frames the change around speed, craft, and the kind of product designer who can carry more of the work without waiting for a handoff.

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Why you'd press play

Hear why Medium eliminated product management and what that move changed for a design team trying to move fast.

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