You’re reading The Steady Beat, a weekly pulse of must-reads for anyone orchestrating teams, people, and agents 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.
Demo Damage
“The boss built a thing and he wants you to take a look.” If that sentence makes you shudder, you’re in good company. Vibe-coding CEOs are everywhere, dropping weekend-built Claude demos on their teams while asking why shipping takes so long. Aboard’s Rich Ziade, himself a CEO, makes the case from inside the suite: cut it out. The vibe-coded demo is the modern CEO’s version of the old strategic memo, except worse. It’s not impressing anyone – everyone’s making demos now. And worse, it’s not clarifying. When an executive shows up with a half-built thing, brains race to manage expectations, not engage with ideas. And “why don’t we just do what I did here?” trivializes the actual product work: the de-risking, the edge cases, the long tail of detail that turns a prototype into something customers can rely on. AI made prototyping cheap. But making something people actually love is just as hard as it ever was.
— Aboard, 6m, #ai, #leadership, #product
Pod Squads
The two-pizza team is shrinking to one slice. (I’ll show myself out.) The new structure of choice is the “pod” – one to eight humans plus a fleet of AI agents, doing what cross-functional teams of ten or fifteen used to do. Coinbase claims to have laid off 14% of its workforce in part to reorganize this way; CEO Brian Armstrong is now experimenting with “one person teams” where a single engineer carries product, design, and PM, with agents handling the rest. Coinbase’s Rob Witoff describes “exponential gains when we have fewer people because you’re spending a lot less time in meetings and getting people on the same page.” Even Amazon, where Bezos invented the two-pizza team, is splitting those into smaller cross-functional pods. Shrinking the size of teams will of course mean less coordination overhead within the team. We learned that with agile and scrum. But what about cross-team coordination in the pod era, when there are more teams?
— WSJ, 5m, #ai, #coordination, #teamsize
Pocket Mentor
You read a great interview and the ideas resonate for a couple of days … and then they evaporate. James Stanier’s fix: turn the people you admire into AI “roles” you can query on demand. Pull a few hours of transcripts from someone’s podcast appearances (Claire Hughes Johnson, Charlie Munger, Naval Ravikant – anyone with enough material to triangulate principles, not soundbites). Feed it all to Claude. Ask for cleaned text, recurring frameworks, and the questions they tend to ask when evaluating ideas. Save the output as a principles document, then write a short role definition pointing at it, with description, core questions, mental models, tone, etc. Before a hard decision, invoke it: “Munger lens on this hiring plan.” What comes back isn’t pretending to be Munger; it’s the questions Munger asks, applied to your context. The technique runs in reverse too. Feed your own writing back and ask the model to extract your patterns.
— The Engineering Manager, 8m, #leadership, #ai, #management
The Other 20%
Everyone sees the complexity in their own job and assumes AI will eat someone else’s. Box CEO Aaron Levie calls this the Gell-Mann amnesia problem of the AI age. His counter-argument, as profiled by Casey Newton: AI typically automates the first 80% of complex work. The last 20% – judgment, context, customer-specific knowledge – is where the actual value lives, and it’s stubbornly human. The current job market data backs him up. Amazon is hiring software engineering interns at historical levels. Engineering openings hit a three-year high, with engineers moving from Silicon Valley into pharma, manufacturing, and banking. Broadly, it appears companies aren’t trading human seats for agent licenses; they’re paying for both.
— Platformer, 9m, #ai, #leadership, #future-of-work
Open Door
Steady’s REST API just got a full redesign, and v2 is live. The new API works at the personal level instead of team level, opens up Steady’s core data (digests, check-ins, goals, activity, and Echoes), and was built OpenAPI-first, meaning the machine-readable spec is the source of truth. You can generate typed clients in any language, spin up a mock server, or import the whole thing into Postman in seconds. And AI agents can introspect endpoints at runtime, no bespoke integration code required. Practical uses: pull check-in data into existing dashboards, script automated check-ins, sync two ways with Notion or Jira. It’s another step towards our making sure Steady can be used by anyone, any agent, anywhere.
— Steady, 4m, #product, #api, #steady
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 team insights — Team health dashboards only help if someone remembers to check them, and by the time you do, a one-week dip has become a one-month pattern. This Echo pulls the nine signals that matter—participation, intentions met, blocker trends, mood—and lands them in your inbox every Monday morning. You see how the team is actually doing, not just what they shipped, while there’s still time to adjust.
The lightweight 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.