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.
Engagement Flatline
Gallup’s latest data on employee engagement is the corporate version of a check engine light. Just 33% of U.S. workers say they’re engaged at work — a number that’s been flat since the pandemic. Even worse, 16% are actively disengaged, creating what Gallup calls an “employee engagement recession.” The culprit? Middle management, caught in a vise between exec mandates and frontline chaos, all while being asked to lead, coach, and manage simultaneously. What’s worse, most managers themselves aren’t engaged, which means the people who are supposed to light the fire are running on fumes. Gallup argues the solution isn’t more perks, but better leadership. Specifically, upskilling managers to have one meaningful conversation per week with each team member. Not 1-on-1s packed with status updates. Actual conversations. About goals, progress, and purpose. It’s a refreshingly low-tech prescription for a high-stakes problem — and it just might work, if we let managers manage.
Editor’s note: if you are a Steady user, here’s an agent preset that will push you a brief right before a 1:1 meeting with all of the background details to keep the discussion in “actual conversation” territory and out of the “repeat status” doldrums.
— Gallup, 6m, #leadership, #engagement, #peoplemanagement
Talent Cliff
The product design world is facing a devastating talent crisis: companies are hoarding senior designers while junior opportunities have plummeted 43% since 2022. Only 1% of design job postings are for internships, and only 5% require 2 years or less of experience, creating a pipeline disaster that threatens the entire discipline’s future. The median experience requirement has ballooned to 8 years, with some roles demanding 15 years and compensation reaching $200K+ at top tech companies. This “Super IC” phenomenon emerged from post-pandemic layoffs and the drive toward lean organizations that need designers who can “sink or swim” immediately. But here’s the rub: today’s super designers learned their craft during an era of abundant junior opportunities that no longer exist. Matthew Ström-Awn argues that unlike other disciplines with established apprenticeship models or clear progression ladders, design lacks the structural incentives to invest in junior talent. The window for action is narrowing fast — as senior designers age out and the pipeline dries up, we’re heading toward a talent cliff that will be expensive and painful to recover from.
— Matthew Ström-Awn, 8m, #talent, #design, #leadership
Coding AI ≠ 10x Superpowers
The AI coding productivity revolution is mostly hype masquerading as math. When you strip away the LinkedIn evangelism and “influencer” cheerleading, those mythical 10x-100x productivity gains start looking about as real as that herbal remedy your aunt swears cures everything. The author — an engineer who fell down the AI anxiety rabbit hole — actually tried all the fancy agentic tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Roo) and discovered what most of us suspected: AI is decent at writing boilerplate but terrible at understanding your actual codebase. More importantly, the bottlenecks that slow down real software teams haven’t magically disappeared. Code reviews still take time. Product managers don’t suddenly pump out 10x the user stories. QA doesn’t test 10x faster. And if you’re a leader buying into these impossible productivity promises, you’re setting your team up for burnout and technical debt. The real 10x engineers prevent unnecessary work — something AI coding assistants are spectacularly bad at. Stop scrolling LinkedIn. Trust your instincts. You’re not falling behind.
— colton.dev, 8m, #productivity, #leadership, #ai
Engineer Consensus
Want your brilliant idea to actually see daylight? Stop trying to win the room and start winning individuals. Venki Ramesh opines on the pre-meeting playbook that separates approved projects from forgotten PowerPoints. The secret sauce isn’t your pitch deck — it’s the conversations that happen before you ever step foot in that conference room. Talk to the key players individually first, address their concerns in private, and incorporate their feedback. Why? Because long discussions kill proposals. When decision-makers already understand your project and feel invested in its success, group meetings become formalities rather than firing squads. The psychology is simple: people hate changing their minds publicly, but they’ll gradually warm to ideas in one-on-one settings. Plus, you’ll catch those project-killing edge cases before they torpedo you in front of the VP. But beware the dark side — this same playbook can manipulate weak leaders into backing terrible ideas. The most politically savvy engineers might steamroll the most technically sound ones. Smart leaders recognize this and maintain healthy skepticism, even when the whole room nods along.
— Venki’s Notes, 4m, #consensus, #engineering, #influence
Coordination Revolution 🎧
Recently, I joined the Agile expert and always upbeat Dave Prior on his podcast to talk about the coordination crisis plaguing digital teams everywhere. Since 2019, meetings have doubled while alignment has somehow gotten worse — teams are drowning in status updates, context switching, and duplicative work that burns everyone out without actually keeping people in sync. We discussed solutions that aren’t more meetings or better project management tools, but fundamentally rethinking how context flows between team members. We also talked about how Steady’s approach centers on “Echoes” — automated context sharing that creates a persistent “shared brain” for teams without adding overhead. The conversation dives into why tracking intentions beats tracking status updates, what AI can realistically solve in modern work coordination (spoiler: it’s not everything, you need good management), and how cross-functional teams can escape the alignment death spiral. Dave’s a great host and I recommend diving into his back catalog if you’re new to his show.
— Steady, 5m, #coordination, #teamwork, #productivity
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