Echoes just got two big upgrades: it can now pull data from Insights and tap into RSS feeds. Get coordination stats, participation leaderboards, and industry news summaries — all on autopilot alongside everything else.
💡 Insights, now in Echoes
Since Echoes first launched, you could use it to work with data from various sources in Steady; check-ins, goal updates, activity, etc. But one thing you could not do is pull in data from Insights, our realtime analytics reports that cover coordination health metrics like participation, readership, etc.
The data was always there in Steady, but it was up to you to remember to go check out the reports. Having to go and manually grab some context isn’t The Steady Way; we’re all about pushing the right context to you, automatically.
So we fixed it. Echoes is now fully Insights-aware, and you can use it in three ways:
- Get a single stat - A prompt like “what was the check-in participation rate on the Frontend team last week?” will generate a response with just that stat, along with the change from the previous period.
- Get all stats - A prompt like “Give me the Insights values for the Frontend team over the last 7 days.” will generate a snapshot of all the Insights reports that are active in your account.
- Generate leaderboards - A prompt like “Generate a leaderboard of team check-in participation over the last 7 days.” will give you an account-level or team-level breakdown, useful for seeing where things are working and where they’re not.
For all three, Echo answers will also include a link to full Insights reports with all the correct filters set. No fiddling with filters if you want to dig in deeper.
You can use these new capabilities on their own – we’ve got two new presets (Weekly team insights, participation leaderboard) that do just that – or you can extend your existing Echoes with Insights data. Whether you’re prepping for retros or 1:1s, or just want to keep track of your personal stats, Insights in Echoes has you covered.
📰 RSS in Echoes
To date, Echoes has only operated on data inside your Steady workspace, covering the “keep up to speed on what’s going on at work” job. But to perform any role well, you also need to keep up to speed on what’s going on in your industry, what new best practices are emerging in your specialty, etc.
That’s where the new RSS/Atom capability in Echoes comes in. Create an Echo with a list of domain names (Steady auto-discovers the actual feed URL) that you want to summarize new posts from, pick a schedule, and you’ve got the industry watercooler at your fingertips, right alongside all the other context you need to do your job. Here’s an Echo preset to get you started.
And because it’s not just a feed reader, you can layer on AI-powered fuzzy filtering, ranking, etc. Want to focus on a specific keyword across blogs instead of everything that’s new? Want to rank entries according to what’s most relevant to you personally? You can do that.
That’s just the start. RSS feeds are everywhere — company blogs, subreddits, news sites — so you can track what your org is publishing, get reminders about posts you need to cross-post, follow specific topics, and a whole lot more.
🏎️ “Performance improvements and bug fixes”
We’ve also been hard at work on a long list of performance improvements and infrastructure updates. Most of it is behind the scenes, but one change you’ll notice right away is to Insights. We optimized all of the queries (up to 80% faster now), and for the heaviest load – the multi-report overview – we’re now loading each card async instead of blocking the page on rendering them all at once.
As a reminder, if you haven’t checked out the new Steady desktop app, give it a try. It’s a great way to get these new Echoes delivered right to your desktop with native notifications.
— The team at Steady
