For Nick and the product team at Medium, though, that failure was the ultimate validation of a feature they’d been slowly improving since it first launched over a year earlier.

The feature has been lauded by readers and writers alike, gathering a healthy following of users (and copycat companies), along with a constant stream of product improvements.

With Highlights, Medium spied an opportunity not only to make sharing writing on Medium easier, but also to turn the tool into one of the leading online publishing platforms.

Vanity metrics like views or clicks, for example, don’t really help when depth and engagement often matter more than reaching a larger audience.

Medium is not just a blogging platform, but a community where people interact with each other and become smarter based on those interactions.

“With Highlights in particular,” Nick explained, “a lot of what we looked to was the Notes feature, where people would leave notes in the margin of a post. We also had a feature called Recommend Notes. When you clicked on Recommend you could write something you liked about a post.”

“A lot of Medium’s product ideas come from a combination of analyzing product history and designers playing around with ideas,” Nick said. “Product managers spend time looking at the different ways people use features, what they try to use them for, and how they use them in ways that we didn’t intend them to.”

One thing the team hadn’t yet considered was how the user experience would play out for people who didn’t yet follow anyone on Medium, or for users who already followed many others. Without some Highlights being surfaced, the former group wouldn’t gain value from the feature — and without some filtering, the latter group would open a popular post only to encounter a wasteland of blue highlights.

For readers, highlighting makes the reading experience more social.

“[Highlights is] one of my favorite features on Medium that’s absent from many other interactive blogging settings. Definitely one of Medium’s USPs (unique selling propositions).” — Anonymous, Quora

That engagement doesn’t have to be positive to be valuable. Highlighting means different things to different people:

They enjoy a quote, passage, or phrase.
They resonate with an insight or concept.
They decide to share a passage on another platform.
They want to capture an idea to return to later.
They disagree with a statement and want to comment.

For writers, feedback is currency.

Highlights gives Medium authors a direct line of feedback from their audience. Beyond the instant gratification of knowing someone read something they wrote, highlights help writers immediately pinpoint which parts of their posts are most engaging and worthwhile to read.

The high readership attracts the best writers. And the best writers get rewarded financially for sharing quality posts.

“nobody has time to read anymore.”

Soon after launching Highlights, they added Text Shots — a tool for sharing Highlights as screengrabs on Twitter.

Presumably, in this case, Medium decided to prioritize depth of discussion.

When your product truly adds value for users, they’ll engage with it more deeply and return more often — especially for consumer products like Medium. That increase in engagement makes your product more “sticky,” leading to higher user retention and sustainable growth.

Do your metrics truly measure engagement with your product, or are they vanity metrics? If the latter is true, can you find one metric that is a better measure of the value users are really getting from your product?
Look at your product roadmap and rank features based on estimated impact on your one metric that matters. How does that affect your feature prioritization?

There’s no substitute for real user feedback and learnings — even if those users are inside your company.

Lesson #3: Don’t assume everyone uses your product the same way

Thanks to features like Highlights and developers like Nick, the system works. Today, Medium is one of the largest writing platforms on the web, boasting $5 million in payments made to writers, 20,000 articles published per day, and nearly 100 million monthly readers.