How to avoid feature flop — and more expert advice you’ll hear tomorrow at Medium Day

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4 min readAug 16, 2024

📹 Medium Day 2024 is tomorrow from 9 AM to 6 PM ET. Here’s the link to register. Scroll down to see the schedule!
Issue #143: Reflections on reproductive health, a tip on how to make friends, and the full Medium Day lineup
By Zulie @ Medium

What do these three problems have in common?

“One of the most common things I hear from founders is: We keep launching features that have no impact. They just flop and we don’t know why.”
“How should you talk about quantum technology? Much of the science communication community has settled on cheap analogies that fuel misunderstanding and hype.”
“[T]he desire to eat chips at a party or watch another Netflix episode.”

They’re all problems that speakers at Medium Day — happening tomorrow between 9 AM and 6 PM ET — will be explaining how to solve.

At 10 AM ET in the Design track, UX designer Rosie Hoggmascall will be talking about how to avoid features that flop. Her solution? One-question surveys.

At 5 PM ET in the Technology track, quantum theorist Chris Ferrie will be sharing how scientists can talk about quantum tech in a way that makes sense to laypeople. Part of the problem, he says, is that we persist in pretending nobody understands quantum physics, which isn’t true.

And at 1 PM ET in the Self-improvement track, user researcher Riikka Iivanainen will explain why some people are better at resisting temptation than others. Or are they? It turns out that people don’t magically have a stronger self-control muscle… but they do have another superpower.

Those are just three of the talks I’m hoping to attend tomorrow. Other amazing speakers on the lineup include:

UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming discussing how we can make our information ecosystem safer and more humane
The Angular blog team talking about how to build the next generation of supercharged web applications
Liza Donnelly, visual journalist and writer, reprising last year’s hit and doing a live drawing sesh
Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine giving his annual keynote speech

Come along and learn something new. I’ll see you there! You can check out the full schedule here.

A long weekend read

If you want to spend 15 minutes reading something heartwrenching, infuriating, and beautiful, I can’t get over this story from neurolinguist, entrepreneur, and health activist Kristina Kasparian, PhD, who navigated a hysterectomy due to years of painful endometriosis — right after her surrogate lost her pregnancy.

It’s a gorgeously written reflection on your right to choose the reproductive healthcare that is right for you, what “selfish” choices mean when it comes to your own body, and how far many of us go to make others comfortable, even in the face of our own pain and suffering. I loved it, even though I hated hearing what Kasparian had gone through. It made me think more deeply about “society’s views on being a woman and having children,” as commenter Skye Knight eloquently put it.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: how to make a new friend

Music therapist Evin Ibrahim points out that, contrary to popular belief, getting older is not a hopeless case of inescapable loneliness. Writing from her experience interning in senior homes during the pandemic, she explains that older adults who have friends work hard at the skill.

How did they do it? “[A]sking questions, finding common ground, offering compliments. But there were also the less-obvious skills that come with emotional intelligence honed over time: kindness, patience, curiosity, and an openness to someone else’s world.”

Quiz: Zoom In

Below is a highly zoomed-in version of an image related to one of the stories linked above. If you know what it is, email us: tips@medium.com. First to guess correctly wins a free Medium membership.