You’re reading The Steady Beat, a weekly pulse of must-reads for anyone orchestrating teams, people, and work across the modern digital workplace – whether you’re managing sprints, driving roadmaps, leading departments, or just making sure the right work gets done. Curated by the team at Steady.
Small Pushes Win
That stalled project gathering dust in your backlog? It’s not waiting for the perfect two-week sprint or a brilliant breakthrough – it needs fifteen minutes today and fifteen minutes tomorrow until physics takes over. Murat Demirbas draws a sharp analogy between stuck work and a stalled truck: you can’t force it to move through sheer willpower, but small periodic pushes at the right rhythm create resonance that builds into unstoppable momentum. The magic isn’t in marathon coding sessions or perfectly planned roadmaps; it’s in touching the work daily so context stays loaded and ideas remain alive. Each tiny completion generates energy for the next task, like a flywheel accumulating power through unglamorous consistency. His practical advice cuts through productivity theater: lower activation energy until starting feels trivial, use LLMs to break hairy problems into concrete subtasks, set a ten-minute timer to defeat the startup friction, and follow your interest instead of forcing linear progress. Success isn’t about finding more hours or better tools – it’s about showing up before you fall out of resonance and need heroic effort just to remember where you left off.
— Metadata, 5m, #productivity, #momentum, #systems
(Un)clean Code
Your codebase is a decade old but half your engineers have been there less than two years – and that’s not a hiring problem, it’s an organizational design choice. Sean Goedecke delivers a devastating structural analysis of why big tech companies consistently produce bad code despite employing brilliant engineers. The culprit isn’t skill or laziness; it’s the deliberate tradeoff between software quality and organizational “legibility” – the ability to rapidly shuffle engineers across projects like interchangeable parts. Stock vesting schedules incentivize departure over expertise, with most engineers moving on after 1-2 years while codebases live for ten. The few “old hands” who stick around become overloaded bottlenecks rather than force multipliers, buried in review requests while trying to ship their own work. Meanwhile, the median productive engineer operates in what Goedecke calls “impure engineering” – tight deadlines, unfamiliar systems, compromised decisions – doing their best in an environment structurally opposed to quality outcomes. Companies accept this degradation because fungibility beats specialization when you’re optimizing for flexibility at scale.
— Sean Goedecke, 6m, #engineering, #systems, #leadership
The Builder Test
Product management is shedding its process-theater skin and the survivors won’t be the ones with the best roadmaps – they’ll be the ones who can ship prototypes by Friday. Peter Yang maps the brutal contraction happening across PM roles, where AI-native companies prioritize “talent density over headcount” and the ZIRP-era model of surrounding engineers with PMs, designers, and data scientists has collapsed. The new reality? Engineers and designers now wield AI tools that eliminate tasks that previously justified dedicated roles, leaving only the PMs who can demonstrate hands-on building as genuinely essential. Certifications mean nothing; proof of work is everything. “Fast beats right” and “execution beats strategy” have shifted from startup mantras to table stakes, and climbing the ladder paradoxically moves you away from actual product work into meeting hell. The irony cuts deep: the seniority you chase removes you from the building that made you valuable. But here’s Yang’s optimistic twist – the PM roles that survive this winnowing will be more fulfilling, not less. Faster-paced, higher-impact, genuinely focused on craftsmanship instead of coordination bureaucracy. The question isn’t whether fewer PM jobs exist; it’s whether you can demonstrate the “figure it out” energy that makes you irreplaceable when teams shrink and expectations skyrocket.
— Creator Economy, 7m, #product, #ai, #transformation
Deep Roots
While everyone else optimizes their LinkedIn for the next VP visibility play, Lalit Maganti spent most of 2023 quietly watching engineers struggle with trace processing before building Bigtrace – now handling 2 billion traces monthly at Google. His essay offers a sharp counterargument to the “always be visible” career orthodoxy: infrastructure and developer tools reward patient stewardship over quarterly heroics. The insight cuts against conventional wisdom because context and depth compound in ways speed never can. Long-term ownership enables pattern matching across diverse teams and spotting systemic problems only visible over extended horizons – advantages invisible to engineers hopping projects every eighteen months for promotion packets. Maganti describes a “shadow hierarchy” where Staff+ engineers in dependent orgs become your advocates upward, and a “utility ledger” measuring impact through ubiquity, criticality, and architectural scale rather than exec presentations. When pressed about why his tracing tool Perfetto hasn’t jumped on the LLM bandwagon, his answer reveals the philosophy: precision and user trust beat trendy features that erode long-term value. This path requires profitable companies sustaining infrastructure investments and some luck landing on stable teams – but staying there is a deliberate choice. Not every career needs spotlight-chasing to matter.
— Lalit Maganti, 8m, #engineering, #career, #infrastructure
Stop Scrolling
You’re drowning in bookmarked conference talks you’ll never watch, subscribed to seventeen newsletters you skim guiltily (except for this one, of course), and vaguely aware there’s probably something important happening in AI-driven team management that you should understand but don’t have time to investigate. Tech Talks Weekly just threw you a lifeline: fifteen essential engineering leadership talks from 2025, curated specifically to cut through the noise plaguing the 20% of their readers holding EM+ positions. Leadership at scale demands staying current on transitions into manager-of-managers roles, AI’s impact on team capacity, authentic communication across hierarchies, and evolving best practices, but the signal-to-noise ratio on YouTube and RSS feeds has become punishing. These talks range from 10 to 50 minutes, sourced from conferences like LDX3 London and Devoxx Greece, with practical view counts suggesting genuine value over algorithmic gaming.
— Tech Talks Weekly, 3m, #leadership, #learning, #curation
Echo of the Week
Echoes are AI agents in Steady that automatically gather and deliver work context to teams on a schedule – answering recurring questions about progress, capacity, and coordination so you stop burning hours assembling the same information manually.
Automatic changelog turns your merged GitHub PRs into polished, customer-ready release notes every two weeks—no more digging through commits or translating tech-speak into plain English. It sorts changes into new features, improvements, and bug fixes, so your customers know what shipped without you spending an hour writing it up.
Stop Drowning in “Work About Work”
Your team loses 21 hours per person, per week slogging through status meetings and hunting for context across chats, docs, and dashboards.
Steady’s AI agents eliminate this coordination tax by continuously delivering personalized guidance on what’s happening, what’s next, and what needs attention across the whole team.
Join the thousands of teams staying in sync, avoiding burnout, and moving 3X faster with Steady.
Learn more at runsteady.com.
