Cassie McDaniel

Cassie McDaniel leads product design, brand and research at Medium as Head of Design. She previously led design at companies like Lattice, Webflow, Glitch, and Mozilla Foundation, where she gravitated toward simplifying complex workflows and contributed to industry innovations like passwordless login. Cassie began advocating for design to address real-world issues while working in a hospital innovation lab. Later, she built a creative design studio and wrote the first draft of a novel before returning to design leadership at Medium, a company she admired for its legacy of great design and commitment to writers. Cassie aims to bridge the gap between art and science in her leadership. Initially wanting to be a painter, she studied graphic design at the University of Florida, where a formative experience co-designing a perpetual calendar alongside the indigenous Wixárika community in Mexico solidified her belief that anything can be designed. After years abroad, she recently returned to Central Florida to renovate a historic home, where she now lives with her family as they attempt to keep hurricanes (among other southern dangers) at bay.