Issue 15

Personal notes

A couple quick updates

• This newsletter issue would normally have been sent last Friday, but I postponed it due to the American Independence Day holiday.
• No doubt you’ve seen the news coverage of the horrific flash flooding that occurred in Texas. It’s been an emotional weekend. My oldest son just finished working at a camp in another part of the state, and I can’t imagine if he had to go through something like this.
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  The worst flooding, in Kerrville, was a two-and-a-half hour drive from me. The second day, however, hit closer to home. Thankfully my family and friends are OK, but just a few minutes away from us (upstream) got 15 inches (38 cm) of rain overnight. To date, this second round flooding closer to home has claimed 8 lives and I fear that will increase. As a volunteer with a local fire department, I spent Saturday staffing an evacuation shelter.

Scuttlebutt News from the UX design, content strategy, and content management communities

​Payload CMS has been acquired by design giant Figma. The open-source CMS was created in 2018 and got venture capital funding in 2022 when it was accepted into the Y Combinator S22 batch. The company has focused on the developer market. While folks in the CMS and content design worlds have speculated about the intent of the acquisition, Payload leadership hints that the move is related to tighter integration with design systems. Figma, for its part, has moved from being a design-only tool to a tool that enables handoffs from designers to developers, and dipping into website creation with a beta of Figma Sites in May 2025. A look at the current Figma pricing page shows that their “Content seat” includes access to “Figma Sites CMS (coming soon).” The Payload acquisition announcement gave other hints too. “Designers create in Figma, then devs recreate in code, then content teams struggle to maintain it all. It’s inefficient and frustrating. And historically, the CMS tends to make it worse. With Figma, we can (and will) solve these problems,” the announcement said. It seems that CMS capabilities coupled with design systems and Figma could create powerful opportunities for content professionals to bring semantics and structure to UI design and to “show, not tell” how structured content enables design flexibilities. It is unclear how the self-hosted Payload will fit into the Figma ecosystem and what that means for existing plugins that connect Figma with other CMS providers.

Solutions

Quick thoughts about selecting content tooling

One of the highlights of my time at Atlassian was leading the charge to modernize and future-proof our new content management system (CMS). Working with my manager, we kicked off a 90-day pilot project, got the OK to evaluate CMS vendors, and secured funding to pay for the CMS and its implementation.

I learned a lot during this process, and we did some things I haven’t seen many others do:

• We set up a leadership “triad” —a product manager, a development manager, and myself as a content designer—that co-owned the selection and implementation process.
• We ran user research sessions with internal stakeholders to understand their CMS needs and wishes.
• We evaluated vendors not just on technical specifications but also on company culture and values.
• We ran a full proof-of-concept (POC) before signing anything.

That experience, at a company with a $50 billion market cap, showed me just how noisy and confusing the CMS landscape can be, even for teams with resources.

Much of the CMS selection literature is created by vendors themselves (biased and too much to sort through), or it comes from analyst firms (expensive and often missing the real-world details you care about).

Once you select a vendor, then you have to navigate the complexities of implementation: internal politics, author experience, governance, migration, integrations. I could go on, but you get the picture.

That’s why I’m excited to launch Choose Your CMS to help CMS buyers get personalized, expert recommendations and a CMS implementation readiness assessment.

If you’re considering a new CMS—or are already neck-deep in one you want to optimize—I’d love to help. Head over to Choose Your CMS to get started.

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Top of mind

Things that are bouncing around in my head as I synthesize a range of ideas

It’s probably no surprise that Texas flooding, emergency response, content/information and journalism are on my mind.

First, a quick look at private sector disaster relief.

Texans love their H-E-B grocery chain for many reasons, but the coolest reason is that they have an entire disaster relief team. The team has a number of specialized vehicles, including:

• Mobile kitchen that can serve 2,000 hot meals (or 10,000 every 3 hours)
• Freshwater tanker
• Communications and operations trailer
• Bunk house
• Trailer of restrooms with showers
• Pharmacy
• Business center enabling cash withdrawals

I saw this in action while working Hurricane Harvey relief efforts, and it’s the best of America.

Now based in San Antonio, H-E-B started in Kerrville in 1905, site of some of the worst flooding this past weekend. There’s a TikTok video of the convoy headed to Kerrville that has been quite popular.

Second, there’s a lot of bad takes about Texas flooding on social media and on certain “news” sources. Be careful what you’re consuming.

Here is a collection of thoughtful, informative fact-based resources to consume and share.

• Austin, TX meteorologist Avery Tomasco shared this post while putting out all sorts of informative, life-saving, empathetic info.
• ​Dr. Daniel Swain put out a thread about the TX flood situation, the difficulty in translating forecasts into life-saving predictions, the difficulty in pinpointing a forecast, and more.
• ​Meteorologist Matthew Cappucci hits some of the same themes in a TV news interview (from a hotel in the southern hemisphere!).
• Houston, TX meteorologist Matt Lanza explains the meteorology, looks at the timeline of warnings, and asserts that NWS budget cuts had no negative impact on this and points out that weather balloon launches were vital to identifying the threat.
• Highly respected meteorologist James Spann also addresses the warning process and reminds us of the importance of having a NOAA Weather Radio, which functions without need for a cell network and will not fail to get your attention.
• The ever-helpful Capital Weather Gang reiterates many of the same themes shared in this thread and assures us this was a natural event. As if we should have to say this.
• ​The Texas Tribune professionally explores if there was sufficient warning.
• Moving away from meteorology to geology, Philip Prince shares a Youtube video that explains the geology behind flash flooding.

These resources share useful facts and analysis. Notice that they don’t shy away from questions, but their questions are intellectually curious, striving to learn and grow, and avoiding any kind of us versus them fingerpointing.

More of this, please.
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John Collins

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