Rooted in Community, Building with Purpose

Medal’s product roadmap is driven by people who use what they build. Ken Colton, Medal’s CEO, is a lifelong gamer who rose through the ranks first as an individual contributor, then as a lead, and then as CTO. Product direction doesn’t come from edicts handed down from business heads optimizing for metrics they don’t fully understand. It comes from engineers and designers who actually play games and are part of the culture they’re building for. Timelines are realistic because the people setting them understand what they’re asking for, fixes make sense because they’re executed by people who have first-hand experienced them, and features are impactful because the people asking for them are also the people who are going to use them. Ultimately, there’s a difference between building for game communities and building with them, and that difference is apparent in every aspect of Medal’s engineering culture.

From a recruitment standpoint, the work the engineering team is doing is easy and exciting to talk about.

As a game clipping and discovery platform with 7.5 million users, there’s a lot we can do to platform game developers, studios, or projects to maximize discovery and amplify their marketing. When real players clip and surface the most exciting, resonant moments from a game they become natural evangelists for that project. What we’re doing is the infrastructure to make that project advocacy happen at scale, in a way that benefits both us and our partner game studios…while also cementing Medal as the destination where players find out about and fall in love with new games.

On the creator side, we're building out AI video editing tools designed to keep players inside the Medal ecosystem, making it faster and easier to capture, edit, and share moments without leaving the platform. In an attention economy where everyone is competing for eyeballs, followers, subscribers, clout…we're focused instead on something different: facilitating real conversations and real connections. The majority of our users aren’t Influencers or god tier 1337 plat 3 pro competitors. They’re players with tens of thousands of hours in their favorite games with their friends who are just after a good time connecting with their friends and making new ones. They care about building meaningful relationships that last beyond a single game. The AI video editor removes the friction of clipping, editing, and sharing, thus allowing players to relax and stay present during sessions, then roll into staying connected afterwards. Largely, our players aren’t inclined toward content creation, so we’re building a tool to take the toil out of it.

On a personal note -

The through-line between Medal’s community partnerships strategy and its product roadmap is what brought me to Medal in the first place.

I wasn’t looking for a job when I first met the Medal team. Ken rolled up with a half dozen others on the engineering team to an indie game dev community event I helped organize.

Medal claimed to to be building a product that helps devs by democratizing discovery, so it felt pretty significant that they were actually coming to meet the community where it’s at.

They came to offer support for the devs in my orgs: Gumbo (indie game dev collective), Women in Games NYC, Arcade Commons (arcade cabinet fabrication non-profit). I had conversations with leadership at Medal about co-hosting playtest nights, connecting his engineers with our devs to get hands on with prototypes, or sponsoring Women in Games pitch events.

Talk is cheap, and it’s easy for a company to say they care about the games industry. It's another thing to keep appearing at community events, supporting developers with no immediate upside, and treating the ecosystem as something worth investing in rather than extracting from. That's why when the opportunity came up, I decided to join, to recruit for them, and to help grow the company. It was kind of a no-brainer. I knew Medal was going to keep showing up, and that I could do a lot of good work through them.

I’m proud to be powered by Medal ✌️

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