May 27, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #509
This newsletter issue was sent out to 190,067 subscribers on Tuesday, May 27, 2025.
Editorial
We hear it every day: “AI will replace you. And if it’s not AI, then it’s people who use AI who will replace you.” But personally, I don’t think either of it is true. If anything, AI amplifies the need for authenticity, curation, critical thinking, and strategy.
Surely, AI can spin up rough prototypes quickly, but getting it to an actual working product requires work. Somebody must orchestrate the process and finesse the experience. And it requires thorough strategic work.
We probably won’t be pushing pixels around and hunting annoying bugs for hours, but perhaps that’s a good thing. Instead, we’ll be shaping the vision of the project, planning for success, and curating experiments to run.
And this newsletter — on strategy — is about a few useful things we need to keep in mind to become less tactical and more strategic.
On another note, join us this Thursday on Meets for Work where we’ll be talking about how to find the job you’ve always wanted, and how you can work best with difficult folks. Christine Vallaure, Jason Mesut, and Geoff Graham share their experiences and pointers on achieving your work goals in life.
Our next stop: Design Patterns For AI Interfaces (starts June 4), on the state of AI in 2025, what it means for designers, and design patterns you can apply right away. Jump to table of contents.
Thank you for reading and for your support in helping us keep the community strong with our newsletter. I hope you’ll have a truly fantastic, productive week ahead, everyone!
— Vitaly
1. WIP It Real Good
A lot of work going on simultaneously is often associated with high productivity, but it can also mean quite the opposite: slowdowns or work that is started but not finished. Now, what can we do if we want to reduce work in progress (WIP) in an organization — to improve workflows and the quality of work? John Cutler shares some helpful tips to help you tackle the challenge.
In his guide “WIP It Real Good,” John examines some of the common adaptations for high WIP and why these strategies may no longer serve teams striving to reduce it. He also shares a set of brainstorming questions you can ask to identify opportunities for meaningful change. “Is the team valuing starting more than finishing?”, “What might you gain by saying ‘no’ more often?”, and “What might be possible with more time for deep work?” are just a few of the questions that can spark discussions and help overcome existing habits and structures. (cm)
2. Measuring The Impact Of Features
When you want to measure the success of a product or feature, you need to be careful not to solely rely on metrics like NPS (oh my!) or revenue. They don’t provide an accurate view of how well a product performs, and sometimes they can even be misleading. Adrian H. Raudaschl wrote a great introduction to a framework that helps you focus on the true heart of product success: TARS.
TARS allows you to balance business goals and user needs by answering the crucial question “What does a good outcome for my feature look like?”. The four letters in “TARS” stand for the four critical areas which the framework takes into account to evaluate features: Target Users, Active Users, Retention, and Satisfaction.
In his guide, Adrian dives deeper into each of the four areas and how you can put all these metrics together. A product metric game changer. And if you are interested in UX metrics and design KPIs, we have a whole course on How to Measure UX with Vitaly. (cm)
3. The Manager’s Handbook
So you’ve been promoted to manager. Your ambitions are high, but you also feel a bit lost on how to master this new, responsible role. No worries, you’re not alone. Alex MacCaw and the team at Clearbit published a free handbook to support you every step of the way: The Manager’s Handbook.
Written as part of the internal management training program at Clearbit, the handbook shares tactics that are transferable to every company. Covering everything from managing yourself, hiring, and coaching to setting goals, fostering collaboration, and resolving conflicts, it distills the collective knowledge of what makes a great manager into practical tips that you can start using immediately. A wonderful foundation to become the manager you would have loved to have. (cm)
4. 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.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Design Patterns For AI Interfaces UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Jun 4–18 - Accessibility for Designers UX
with Stéphanie Walter. Jun 16–24 - Figma Workflow Masterclass Design
with Christina Vallaure. July 23–29 - Building Interactive, Accessible Components with Modern CSS & JS Dev
with Stephanie Eckles. Aug 18–27 - UX Strategy Masterclass UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Aug 20–29 - Smart Interface Design Patterns UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Video + UX Training - Jump to all workshops →
5. Product Playbooks
Is your problem worth solving? Do enough users experience this issue to make up a market, and are they willing to pay for the solution? When approaching a specific product design problem, there are a lot of open questions, and having a set of proven tactics that worked well in the past can give you the confirmation you need to take action. That’s where the Product Playbooks by Learning Loop come in.
Covering validation patterns, business model patterns, workshop patterns, and persuasive patterns, Product Playbooks supports you in every step of the product design process, with plays that can be reliably repeated and that help teams take action in various scenarios. The plays are, of course, no requirements but suggestions and tactics that have proven effective in the past. A treasure chest of practical tips, activities, strategies, and real-world examples. (cm)
6. The Little Book Of Strategy
No matter how experienced you are, it is normal to get stuck on your strategy and leadership journey every now and then. For those occasions, Peter Bihr wrote The Little Book Of Strategy. Drawing on his experience from seeing the pitfalls and mistakes that leaders encounter in their day-to-day, he shares actionable advice to help you get past those moments.
The guide covers strategies, ways of thinking, and leadership skills to help you master the messy, ongoing process that strategy is. Filled with short reminders and nuggets of wisdom, it is the perfect quick read you can return to or skim through whenever you feel stuck in your day-to-day work. (cm)
7. Recently Published Books 📚
Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been at the core of everything we do at Smashing.
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. Have you checked them out already?
- Success at Scale by Addy Osmani
- Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns
- Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces by Steven Hoober
- Check out all books →
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).
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