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.
Pinhole Thinking
When VCs talk about AI value, they’re staring through a pinhole at headcount reduction while a panorama of possibilities stretches behind them. Kent Beck’s sharp critique of the “labor replacement” narrative reminds us that cost-cutting is the laziest lens for evaluating transformative technology. The real framework? Four levers: lower costs, delayed costs, higher revenue, and earlier revenue. That last one deserves your attention. AI doesn’t just let you ship features with fewer people; it lets you ship them faster, which means revenue arrives sooner, which means your NPV calculation looks wildly different than the headcount spreadsheet suggests. Consider the support team that triples customer capacity without layoffs, or the sales org maintaining deeper relationships across more accounts. Then there’s optionality: the strategic flexibility to pursue markets, experiments, and business models that simply weren’t viable before. Real-time translation opens new geographies overnight. Faster experimentation multiplies your shots on goal. All in all, “focusing only on headcount reduction is like saying the only value of a car is that you don’t have to pay for a horse.”
— Tidy First?, 4m, #ai, #strategy, #leadership
Title Drop
Foursquare didn’t just flatten their org chart, they torched the entire manager playbook. After watching product launches stretch from months to years under layers of “calcification,” leadership made a radical move: eliminate engineering manager titles entirely, swap them for tech leads focused on technical excellence, and rebuild performance management around teams instead of individuals. The outcome: they went from struggling to ship anything for two years to launching monthly. Not because of the title change itself, but because of the philosophical shift underneath. “A high-performing team is more impactful than a team of high performers” became the operating principle, which meant scrapping individual performance metrics that rewarded heroes at the expense of collaboration. Tech leads now own product excellence and team effectiveness, not the soul-crushing machinery of performance reviews and promotion politics. But you can’t cherry-pick this approach: Foursquare had to redesign compensation, feedback loops, recruiting, and role definitions simultaneously. They also learned that AI tools became critical for filling the coaching gaps that emerged when traditional managers disappeared.
— Charter, 6m, #management, #engineering, #transformation
Observation Mode
The fastest way to make someone stop listening is to tell them who they are. Wes Kao’s latest piece tackles the linguistic precision that separates feedback that lands from feedback that triggers a defensive crouch. The shift is subtle, but it works: replace “you are X” with “you come across as X” or “you seem X.” It sounds like semantic hair-splitting until you realize what’s actually happening. When you declare someone “lacks emotional regulation,” you’re making a claim about their entire character based on a slice of behavior you’ve observed in one context. Hyper-rational people (and tech is full of them) will immediately challenge the overreach, and now you’re debating epistemology instead of addressing the actual problem. Kao’s reframe acknowledges reality: you only see how people show up at work, not who they are at their core. Adding qualifiers like “when you do X specific thing” makes your observation narrower, more defensible, and harder to dismiss. It also signals intellectual humility, since you’re sharing your perception, not delivering a verdict.
— Wes Kao’s Newsletter, 5m, #leadership, #feedback, #coaching
Pizza Math
AI just broke the two-pizza team. For years, Amazon’s famous heuristic – if it takes more than two pizzas to feed your team, it’s too big – guided how we structured engineering orgs. But when coding stops being the bottleneck, the math changes completely. The new constraint? Product managers and designers, who benefit far less from AI acceleration, now determine your velocity. Typically you’ve got 4-7 engineers but one (sometimes shared) PM and designer. That ratio made sense when implementation was slow, but now it’s inverted. Enter the “one-pizza team”: 2-3 engineers max, with product engineers who own roadmaps and talk directly to users while specialists maintain code quality. This approach is not just plain more with less; it’s about recognizing where human judgment still matters. AI generates acceptable code but rarely excellent code. It overlooks second-order consequences, struggles with complex debugging, and happily replicates destructive patterns across your entire codebase. You need specialists as quality gatekeepers, not generalists generating volume. The author’s prediction: engineering managers will code more and manage fewer people, teams will shrink dramatically, and the org chart will restructure around PM/design capacity rather than engineer headcount. The two-pizza rule isn’t dead, it just needs smaller pizzas.
— Jampa, 6m, #ai, #engineering, #teamsize
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.
Cross-team highlights – Ever feel like you’re always the last to know what another team shipped? This Echo delivers a monthly digest of any team’s work, distilled into five high-level themes with plain-English summaries. Perfect for product managers who need engineering updates without the jargon, marketing leads planning around the roadmap, or anyone managing cross-functional dependencies. No meetings required.
Stop Drowning in “Work About Work”
Your team loses 21 hours per person, per week slogging through status meetings and hunting for context across chats, docs, and dashboards.
Steady’s AI agents eliminate this coordination tax by continuously delivering personalized guidance on what’s happening, what’s next, and what needs attention across the whole team.
Join the thousands of teams staying in sync, avoiding burnout, and moving 3X faster with Steady.
Learn more at runsteady.com.
