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.
Shared Brain
Forget the AI hype about individual productivity – the real breakthrough is using AI to build a “shared brain” for your team. In a guest post on the always enlightening Engineering Leadership newsletter, (thanks, Gregor!) I argue that while everyone’s obsessing over AI code assistants, we’re missing the bigger prize: applying AI’s context-assembly superpowers to teamwork itself. My approach centers on three ingredients of effective teams: trust and transparency, balancing accountability and autonomy, and real-time context (the secret sauce that enables the other two). The magic happens when you designate a “context broker,” collect forward-looking intentions instead of backward-looking status reports, and feed everything into shared LLM projects that create team briefs highlighting connections and potential conflicts. This way, you’re building coordination intelligence as a resource rather than interrupting flow for manual context assembly. Start small, stay human-centered, and remember: AI doesn’t make the decisions, it just makes sure everyone has the context to make good ones.
— Engineering Leadership, 8m, #coordination, #ai, #teamwork, #management, #leadership
Broken Venues
Despite decades of workplace innovation and billions in office renovations, space effectiveness hasn’t improved since 2008. That bombshell comes from Janet Pogue McLaurin at Gensler, whose team surveyed 16,809 workers across 16 countries. The culprit? Organizations still treat space as a cost center instead of strategic leverage. Meanwhile, the generational workplace myth is costing companies money – Gensler’s data shows 18-year-olds and 60-year-olds want identical office experiences. The real differences show up by country and industry, not age. Only 21% of workers feel included in office design decisions, but those who are involved show dramatically better performance scores. Smart companies have stopped managing offices and started curating venues, thinking experiences over square footage. The fix requires three moves: involve employees in design decisions, map emotional journeys through your space, and pilot concepts before scaling. After 15 years of stagnant effectiveness, leaders face a choice: keep shoving people into spaces that don’t work, or start designing venues that drive results.
— The Work Forward, 8m, #workplacedesign, #leadership, #engagement
Drop the Act
New engineering managers inheriting senior talent often fall into the same trap: desperately trying to out-engineer engineers who’ve been sharpening their craft while you were reading leadership blogs. Spoiler alert – you won’t win that game. This piece cuts through three critical mistakes that turn promising EMs into insecure performance theater directors. First, stop trying to be the technical expert in every stack (impossible while juggling management duties). Instead, lean into what experienced engineers actually need: better problem framing, project breakdown, and stakeholder communication. Second, ditch the “hire smart people and disappear” philosophy – even your best engineers need setup, periodic check-ins, and your presence during critical moments. Third, stop tiptoeing around feedback because you’re afraid to offend the veterans. They have blind spots too, and withholding observations until annual reviews helps nobody. Your job isn’t to compete with senior engineers but to multiply their impact through clarity, support, and strategic coaching.
— Diary of an Engineering Manager, 4m, #management, #engineering, #leadership
Shovelware No Show
A seasoned developer with 25 years under his belt took a flamethrower to the AI coding hype machine – and the data is devastating. While 78% of developers claim AI makes them more productive (with 14% bragging about 10x gains), there’s one glaring problem: where’s all the new software? If AI truly supercharged productivity, we’d be drowning in indie apps, Steam shovelware, and side projects. Instead, after analyzing tens of terabytes of data across GitHub, mobile app stores, and game platforms, the charts are flatter than a pancake. No hockey stick growth. No indie boom. Zero correlation with AI adoption timelines. The author’s own six-week productivity experiment mirrors the METR study findings: AI actually slowed him down by 21%. Meanwhile, real humans are getting fired for not adopting these “productivity” tools fast enough, salaries are being slashed under the assumption that AI changed the value equation, and companies are rebranding as “AI-first” based on pure FOMO. The brutal conclusion? If someone claims they’re now a 10xer because of AI, demand receipts or tell them to shut up. The emperor has no code.
— Mike Loves Robots, 8m, #productivity, #engineering, #leadership, #ai, #vibes
Stop Drowning in “Work About Work”
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