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.
Managing Your Manager
Your boss might be a brilliant strategist and a terrible manager at the same time, and that’s not a contradiction. Rands unpacks three archetypes from his career: The Artist who doesn’t value humans but rewards those who demonstrate care through thorough documentation; The Dictator who bulldozes meetings with sheer force of opinion until you match their preparation intensity; and The Knife, so inscrutably bad that the only winning move is staying out of the way entirely. The reality is that each one drives massive shareholder value despite being genuinely awful at the human side of management, so they aren’t going anywhere. That’s because leadership and management are different muscles – one shows direction, the other shows current state – and excelling at one doesn’t require competence at the other. Just know that you can’t change them. The energy you spend wishing your boss would change is energy stolen from figuring out how they actually operate. Study whether they lean strategic or tactical, adapt your communication style, and stop expecting a leadership development epiphany that’s never coming.
— Rands in Repose, 6m, #leadership, #management, #career
Speed Without Understanding
Your team is shipping faster than ever, and that might be the most dangerous thing happening to your codebase right now. Ganesh Pagade introduces “cognitive debt” – the invisible gap between how fast engineers generate code with AI tools and how deeply they actually understand what they’ve built. Unlike technical debt, which at least shows up in code reviews and architecture discussions, cognitive debt is silent. It doesn’t trigger alerts, doesn’t appear on dashboards, and doesn’t slow anyone downa; until it does, catastrophically. That’s because manual coding forced comprehension through friction, and AI removes that friction entirely. Engineers ship features they only partially grasp. Reviewers can’t audit code faster than AI generates it, so they rubber-stamp what they haven’t examined. Junior developers never build the tacit understanding that turns them into senior architects, because the struggle that created that knowledge has been optimized away. The fix is to prevent the debt by making comprehension as visible and valued as velocity.
— Beyond the Code, 8m, #engineering, #ai, #leadership
Solow’s Sequel
“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Robert Solow said that in 1987 about PCs, and nearly four decades later, AI is writing the exact same story. A study of 6,000 executives across four countries concludes that despite $250 billion in corporate AI investment in 2024 alone, nearly 90% of surveyed firms report zero measurable impact on employment or productivity over three years. The average employee uses AI tools just 1.5 hours per week — hardly the revolution the pitch decks promised. Meanwhile, researchers can’t agree on whether the actual productivity gains are 40% (MIT’s optimistic lab results) or a paltry 0.5% over a decade (Daron Acemoglu’s more sober estimate). Economist Torsten Slok puts it bluntly: AI is invisible in employment data, productivity data, and inflation data outside the Magnificent Seven’s earnings calls. Yet here’s the twist – those same executives still forecast a 1.4% productivity bump within three years. Sound familiar? It should. The IT revolution eventually delivered, but only after organizations stopped bolting new technology onto old workflows and redesigned the work itself.
— Fortune, 5m, #ai, #productivity, #strategy
Your Highest-Leverage Meeting
You get roughly 25 hours a year of dedicated face time with your manager. That’s it. And if you’re spending most of it on status updates, you’re trading your most valuable career asset for information that belongs in an email. Steve Huynh, an ex-Principal Engineer at Amazon, breaks 1:1s into three distinct conversations – Status, Career Growth, and Future/Strategy – and argues that letting any one dominate (or disappear) is how careers quietly stall. The trap is familiar: you walk in planning to discuss your promotion path, get pulled into the weeds on a blocking issue, field a question about priorities, and suddenly your 30 minutes are gone. Huynh’s fix: send written status updates before the meeting so the routine stuff gets handled asynchronously, freeing the room for conversations that actually move your career. But the real insight cuts deeper: different career stages demand different 1:1 strategies. New to the role? Clarify the unwritten rules. Established performer? Surface what growth looks like from here. Chasing a promotion? Get specific about the gaps. And regardless of stage, bring strategic observations to the table, because your front-line insights are exactly the context your manager lacks. The manager-report relationship is the single biggest predictor of how your performance review lands. Treat the meeting accordingly.
— A Life Engineered, 6m, #management, #career, #productivity
Planning & Trust
An elderly woman spends an entire day mailing a postcard. A busy person does it in three minutes. Cyril Northcote Parkinson used that image in 1955 to describe what every manager already knows in their bones: work expands to fill whatever time you give it. Pair that with Hofstadter’s Law — it always takes longer than you expect, even when you account for Hofstadter’s Law — and you’ve got the two forces quietly sabotaging every project timeline you’ve ever set. Michał Poczwardowski argues these aren’t just clever observations; they’re symptoms of a deeper problem: trust. When organizations hide real deadlines, they trigger both laws simultaneously. Teams pad estimates because they don’t trust the timeline, then fill the padded time with perfectionism because there’s no real urgency. The practical fixes: timebox ruthlessly to create artificial scarcity, define “done” concretely so teams know when to stop polishing, and use public commitments to front-load effort instead of back-loading panic. But the real insight is that no amount of process discipline fixes a trust deficit.
— Perspectiveship, 5m, #productivity, #management, #systems
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.
Weekly 1:1 prep — Stop scrambling for context five minutes before your one-on-ones. This Echo automatically generates a comprehensive briefing for each direct report every Monday at 11 AM, covering what they worked on in the past week, their current goals, any blockers they’ve reported, and all merged pull requests. It’s the prep work you never have time to do, done for you — so you can walk into every 1:1 fully informed and ready to have the conversations that actually matter.
The AI-powered teamwork OS
Teams rely on two coordination loops to function: a big-picture loop connecting plans to progress, and a ground-level loop keeping teammates in sync.
Problem is, status quo approaches to running those loops are an incomplete, inconsistent, and inefficient tangle of meetings, emails, chat threads, dashboards, and manual toil.
Steady is the teamwork OS that runs both loops for you. Purpose-built agents continuously distill updates and activity into personalized intelligence that keeps everyone aligned and informed automatically.
The outcome: high-performing teams that deliver better work, 3X faster.
Learn more at runsteady.com.
