This week, my co-authors and I are turning in the first half of UX Skills for Business Strategy to our editor. I’m proud of the work we’ve done—and like any midway point, I can see how much farther there is to go!
One of the core challenges of writing this book, on top of how difficult it is to wrest this kind of thinking from our brains, is to organize the information. It’s not a completely unique content management challenge, but does sort of combine the challenges of indexing with the problems of creating an encyclopedia.
Here’s the kind of content we’re organizing:
Descriptions of skills and the contexts in which UX pros (like content designers!) can be successful using them.
Each skill also belongs in a phase that relates to the software development lifecycle and the design process.
Descriptions of impacts and common ways those can be measured.
Each impact also belongs in a category of related impacts, like “Financial” or “Operational”.
Impact statements that relate skills and impacts, connecting the dots between how this skill makes this impact.
The impact statements are also sorted into levels of impact that should be expected, from low-effort “quick wins” to impacts that should be expected in the longer term or with more effort.
It’s a lot. If I were very familiar with standing up lightweight content management systems, I might have done that already—but we’ve only gelled into this set of content in the past few weeks. The core idea is stronger than ever, but we’ve needed these additional phases, levels, and categories to make them usable.
So the fumble: Even as a seasoned content pro in 2025, I’ve led our small authoring team to store massive amounts of content in a spreadsheet. 😱
The spreadsheet enables us to align impacts to skills in a giant matrix, so that we can review all of the impact statements in a column, across all the skills that reference that skill. It lets us compare all of the “pitfalls and risks” for each skill, also in a giant column. It’s useful, messy, and unwieldy, and doesn’t easily translate into a doc we can edit and turn in for our deadline.
But with a few spreadsheet formulas and some hand-coded HTML, I turned the spreadsheet content into the documents we needed. 💪 We are reviewing and editing the content in situ, because we will read and react to the content differently in a doc than in a spreadsheet!
I’m sure there are other ways we could have organized the information to make this weird wine pairing guide-inspired guide to UX skills and impacts, but my content encoding and old-school content management is helping make our work possible right now.
If you also lean on old-school skills sometimes, please tell me about it! I’d love to hear about your coding, clean-up, formulas, or other ways you just make it work, even when it seems like the whole world has found other ways to do it better. (And if you know of a CMS that would work better for us, I’d love to hear about that too!)
