Chirp: New book details, conferences, energy and joy
Chirp: A newsletter from Catbird Content

I FINALLY GET TO TELL YOU ABOUT THE NEW BOOK!


🎉 UX Skills for Business Strategy 🎉


My co-authors (Maya Joseph-Goteiner and Kim Mats Mats) and I are making this book to work like a wine pairing guide, matching business goals with UX methods. We hope to enable folks to go quickly from business criteria to creating the user behaviors and attitudes that will help them meet (and exceed!) their objectives.


All this work will pay off if UX professionals–whether in content, interaction, visual, research, product, or other specialties of UX–use this reference not only to select the most impactful skills to meet their business and user goals, but also to persuade stakeholders to resource and celebrate UX initiatives. The book should be equally useful to prepare for stakeholder and annual reviews, by helping people articulate the impact the UX has had on the business from multiple angles.


We’re working with the amazing team at O’Reilly Media, the same team that brought Strategic Writing for UX to life. It’s scheduled for final publication in January 2026, but chapters may be available as prerelease on their platform before that.


If you’d like to be involved (do you have important thoughts or a story to share?) Sign up here.

Coming up soon with Catbird Content:

Finds

Folks, get ready for some Button Conference love. I want to tell you about three of the watch parties that I’m attending this year (and I’ll probably watch the talks as soon as they’re available in the library, and then *again* at the watch party).

Long before Catbird Content was invited to be an in-kind sponsor of Button, I bought my own ticket and encouraged others to come. Talks like these are one of the huge benefits of Button: There are not only these world-class talks, they exist as a library to revisit for a whole year. If you want to browse the catalog (ahem! program) ahead of time, it’s all at Button.  


BONUS: Right now, save $100 on individual tickets with my code: CATBIRD100


Flexes and fumbles

I’m proud that I was able to share my workshop Content Design for Developers at THAT conference in Wisconsin. I had a terrific time with the attendees: Mostly developers in web frameworks, who are doing a great job in America’s Heartland to keep businesses of all types and sizes having web-available content and experiences.


One of the best parts was to hear the user-centeredness of the developers in the session about why they came to the 4-hour experience: Overwhelmingly, they wanted to make sure their audiences understood, whether that was undergrads at university or business users, or to make sure the experiences were accessible for people with disabilities. Warms my heart! The feedback was that they did receive useful information and frameworks to increase that understanding, so I’m satisfied. 😃


My fumble this time is all about energy: It’s a challenge for me. I am in a constant state of surprise at my own level of energy, usually because I think “I have time for that!” and according to the calendar, I do. But there isn’t such an easy visualization for the amount of energy I might have to spend, and what kind of energy that might be.


For a concrete example: I thought I’d be done with the first draft of Chapter 5: Building AI Features (for Strategic Writing for UX, 2nd Edition) by now. I’m not. I have made a lot of progress, but I’m still at least *another* week away from a solid first draft.


As a content professional, I know there’s no such thing as “writer's block.” There are definitely times (and energy states!) when it’s easier to write, and subjects, moments, and confusions that makes it much more challenging. But progress, however slow, is progress. I’m still on target to hit my deadlines, but I was hoping for more wiggle room.

Alt text: Pink letters appear within yellow quotation marks: "Progress, however slow, is progress." The background is white, and there's a gray catbird perched on a pencil at the top. At the bottom, it says "Torrey Podmajersky" and has the URL “Catbirdcontent.com/chirp”

Philosophy

As I write this, I’m sitting outside in breezy, partly-sunny weather, typing on my laptop. I had several meetings this morning, back-to-back on different topics. All of them were with pleasant people, working on interesting, challenging, entirely different projects. I had some lunch after that, and took a briefly longer lunch to spend 30 minutes kayaking in Puget Sound, and drop off a birthday card for my Grandma.


I’m sharing all this because past-me would have focused on how many times I context-swapped: from pre-meeting tasks to meeting to meeting to meeting, to making lunch, to getting exercise, to meeting a familial obligation.


Present-me, though, took a moment to just grin at the sunshine. What a good morning it was! How lucky I am to live this extraordinary life!


It sounds strange, but I’m a novice when it comes to noticing and appreciating how much happiness, satisfaction, enjoyment I get from the mundane, day-to-day things. (I mean, Puget Sound is anything but mundane. But for me, it’s more accessible than a gym membership. I’m still really lucky.)


It seems like a little thing: All I did was remember to notice that I had a great morning.

I hope you have a similar opportunity today, too.

I write these newsletters myself, and I stand by what’s in them. If you have kudos, concerns, or questions, please tell me. —Torrey