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.
Context > Data
Most teams measure what’s easy to measure — velocity, ticket counts, sprint burndown. But those are proxies, not performance. In a PMI webinar I co-hosted, titled Context Is the New KPI, you’ll hear why the next generation of team metrics won’t be about counting inputs, but about ensuring everyone has shared, up-to-date context. The argument? If your team is aligned on the “why” and the “what,” the “how” and the “how fast” tend to take care of themselves. The session dives into how AI agents and human systems can work together to maintain that context in real time — without derailing flow or adding meetings. It’s part workflow hygiene, part leadership mindset shift, and part tactical guide to building what we at Steady call a shared brain for teamwork.
— Steady/PMI/UMD, 6m, #coordination, #leadership, #ai
The AI Agent Minimum Viable Magic
In a world obsessed with AI agents doing everything, Dan Shipper asks a blunt question: What’s the smallest useful thing they can actually do? His answer: less than you think, but just enough to matter. Instead of chasing the dream of a fully autonomous agent running wild through your workflows (and breaking things along the way), Shipper argues for a “magic minimum” approach. Think sets of agents that assist, not replace. They handle small, repeatable tasks where success is obvious and failure is harmless — like cleaning up CRM records or assembling context from disparate systems. These jobs aren’t sexy, but they’re the building blocks of trust. And trust is the fuel AI agents need before you let them near anything high-stakes. This is the approach we’ve taken with Steady - context assembly and pattern recognition that actually works (and can be trusted) today, and gradually expanding from there.
— Every, 6m, #ai, #automation, #leadership
The Robot Will See You Now
AI is crashing the last human stronghold of management: the dreaded performance review. According to Fortune, companies like Walmart, Liberty Mutual, and even the U.S. Air Force are starting to use AI to summarize feedback, detect bias, and suggest development goals. The promise? Faster, fairer, and more objective evaluations. The reality? Well, humans are still in the loop — because AI has a nasty habit of missing nuance (or, you know, hallucinating). Managers remain responsible for the final word, but AI is increasingly the first draft. The trend is part of a broader movement to automate corporate bureaucracy — not to replace bosses, but to cut the busywork so they can actually lead. For leaders, this raises a new skill requirement: knowing how to collaborate with AI without outsourcing empathy or accountability. In other words, don’t let the robot write your management script wholesale. Use it like spellcheck for feedback — helpful, but not for the message itself.
— Fortune, 6m, #leadership, #ai, #management
AI Can’t Do Your Job (Yet)
Turns out, AI isn’t gunning for your job — it’s just fumbling through it. In this spicy takedown, Joe Procopio unpacks why today’s AI tools, while flashy, still get tripped up by the messy realities of human work. The problem? Knowledge work is full of squishy, unstructured nuance. Things like managing interpersonal dynamics and making subjective decisions with incomplete data are not what LLMs were trained for. Instead, AI excels at producing plausible-sounding output with alarming confidence — often wrong, rarely aware. The article warns against the temptation to hand off complex workflows to AI chat. Leaders should treat AI prompting like a instructing a drunk intern with a superpower: brilliant in spots, but in need of constant oversight. For teams orchestrating actual work, this means using AI as a helper, not a decision maker. Keep the humans in the loop, or risk watching your ops go sideways while ChatGPT confidently explains why 2+2=5.
— Ehandbook, 6m, #ai, #leadership, #futureofwork
Teamwork for the AI Era
Ship better work, 5X faster, without burnout
Steady is an AI-native team coordination app that gives everyone complete personalized context, automatically. It works by synthesizing real human insight with activity from all of the tools that teams use.
With Steady, teams deliver better work 5X faster, without tedious meetings, misalignment, or coordination chaos.
Learn more at runsteady.com.
