Smashing Newsletter: Issue #523

Editorial

Almost every time we design pixels on the screen, we have a goal in mind. In fact, across verticals and horizontals, we all work towards a shared goal, shaped by the business, and hopefully refined by our contributions.

Yet too often it’s incredibly difficult to translate business goals and OKRs and vision and objectives into actionable design initiatives or technical projects that we can run. Mostly just because we don’t speak the language that business speaks, don’t know how they work, how they make decisions, and how to visualize the value of our work to them (we have a whole video course on Measuring UX, too).

In this newsletter, we dive into all of that. Looking at useful techniques, guides and tools to help you get a slightly better understanding of the business side of things — and feel more comfortable and more confident in it.

On another note, we’re preparing final things for our upcoming events this and next month. We’d love to meet you and your wonderful team there!

UX Workshops in Antwerp, Belgium 🇧🇪 — on UX metrics and advanced design systems with Brad Frost and yours truly,
SmashingConf New York 2025 🇺🇸 — on design systems, AI, UX, front-end and dashboard UX.
SmashingConf Amsterdam 2026 🇳🇱 — on UX, design systems, accessibility, CSS, and design patterns.

We’d be absolutely delighted to see you in New York — and please do bring your friends and colleagues as well! We have friendly team bundles as well! And have a wonderful, inspiring, and kind rest of the week, everyone!

— Vitaly

1. The Dangerous Animals Of Product Management

Maybe you’ve been there before: You have a clear vision, strategy, and roadmap for your product, and suddenly, stakeholders come to the table with unvalidated requests. To help you deal with challenging stakeholders and situations, the folks at Productboard released a handy toolkit: The Dangerous Animals of Product Management.

The eBook and accompanying video series introduce you to the ten dangerous animals you might encounter in the product management process. You’ll meet the HiPPO, for example, (“highest-paid person’s opinion”), the ZEbRA (“zero evidence but really arrogant”), or Seagull Managers, noisy managers who occasionally swoop in, cause an uproar, and leave your team to clean up after the mess. The series teaches you a mix of soft skills and frameworks to limit their power and help you stay true to your carefully-planned product strategy. (cm)

2. Free Design Leadership Books

How can design leaders effectively connect design to business? Ryan Rumsey wrote two guidebooks that are jam-packed with practical tips for enhancing design leadership skills: Play Up Your Impact and Business Thinking for Designers. Both are available for free download and bound to become invaluable companions on your design leadership journey.

Play Up Your Impact is aimed at designers, researchers, content strategists, writers, and anyone else who wants to learn how to use data to understand their impact at work. Drawing on Ryan’s experience from leading design at Apple, EA, Nestlé, and USAA, the guide offers a practical approach to utilizing data, statistics, and storytelling to analyze and advocate how your work contributes to the bottom line.

Business Thinking for Designers is all about gaining trust and building better relationships with business partners. It includes actionable plays on how designers can enhance communication with colleagues, communicate design values, and maximize impact through a business-minded approach. (cm)

3. Think And Talk Like An Executive

Getting buy-in from executives is a necessity for UX design leaders, but it’s often easier said than done. To help you get executive support for your UX initiatives, Jared M. Spool introduces you to the essential skill of thinking and talking like an executive.

In his article “The Need to Think and Talk like an Executive,” Jared explores how you can take on your executives’ perspective to assess how your design ideas will pay off, in terms of value that executives understand: money, profit, and growth. The starting point is a list of five questions that help you clarify how UX design might benefit the organization, enabling you to communicate that value more effectively. (cm)

4. ROI Calculators

Your boss is hesitant that the work you’ll put into a design system will eventually pay off? The Design System ROI Calculator might be just what you need to convince them that the time and money invested in a design system is a good investment.

The ROI calculator helps you understand and project cost savings when implementing a design system. It calculates total employee savings from implementing a design system, as well as time savings and efficiency gains by component.

Human Factors International also offers a series of handy ROI calculators you can use to show the impact of your UX work. They help you calculate the ROI for design efforts that increase productivity, reduce reliance on help desks, increase conversion rate, reduce costs on formal training, decrease drop-off rate, and reduce the initial learning curve of your product. (cm)

5. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences

That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.

Smashing Online Events — With online workshops, we aim to give you the same experience and access to experts as in an in-person workshop from wherever you are.

As always, here’s a quick overview:

Behavioral Design Workshop UX
with Susan and Guthrie Weinschenk. Sep 18 – Oct 3
Dataviz Accessibility Workshop Dev
with Sarah L. Fossheim. Sep 22 – Oct 6
Designing Websites That Convert UX
with Paul Boag. Sep 30 – Oct 9
Advanced Design Systems Workflow
with Brad Frost. Oct 1–10
Live UX Training: Smart Interface Design Patterns (Video + training) UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Oct 17 – Nov 17
Designing Better Products Masterclass UX
with Stéphanie Walter. Oct 21 – Nov 4
Design Patterns For AI Interfaces UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Oct 30 – Nov 13
Jump to all workshops →

6. Guide To Product Prioritization

Without a product prioritization process, PMs risk that they rely too much on instinct when making product decisions, and that can result in urgent user problems remaining unresolved. To support a more systematic approach to prioritization, the folks at Roadmunk published a practical guide.

The Ultimate Guide to Prioritization explores how product goals, customer demand, and the competition fit within the prioritization process and how to manage the expectations of customers, stakeholders, and customer-facing teams. It also takes a closer look at ten quantitative prioritization frameworks, highlighting the pros and cons of each so that you can easily find the one that best fits your needs. (cm)

7. New Ways Of Working Playbook

How can we work better? How can we make our meetings more purposeful? How can we improve how we share feedback, make decisions, and solve conflicts? In short, how can we create a workplace where everyone in the team thrives?

The New Ways Of Working Playbook is a wonderful resource for teams to explore and experiment with collaboration patterns. Covering all aspects of working together, the playbook features carefully curated resources for both theory and practice that help you implement New Ways Of Working patterns in your work. As Mark Eddleston, the creator of the Playbook, points out, there’s no “right” place to start when using the playbook, so begin with a pattern that feels most needed by your team. (cm)

8. Meet Accessible UX Research, A Brand-New Smashing Book 📚

In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. For our newest book, we have teamed up with Dr. Michele A. Williams: Meet “Accessible UX Research.”

“Accessible UX Research” is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust. Print edition shipping Fall 2025. eBook also available for download in Fall 2025. Pre-order the book, and save off the full price.

That’s All, Folks!

Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!

This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).

September 2, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #523

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