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.
Wrong Frame
The agentic AI gold rush of 2025 has teams sprinting toward a familiar cliff – treating transformative technology as just another efficiency play. Like nineteenth-century engineers who saw railroads as merely faster canals, today’s RPA-trained experts are automating workflows that shouldn’t exist rather than reimagining how work itself gets done. The real tragedy? While they count hours saved and headcount reduced, competitors are building coordination architectures that collapse weeks of back-and-forth into minutes. Toyota didn’t win by making lean manufacturing more efficient; they won by turning it into a system of distributed problem-solving. Similarly, agentic AI’s value isn’t in cheaper task execution but in governance frameworks that let multiple agents perceive context, negotiate with each other, and achieve outcomes without the rigid workflows we’ve accepted as necessary evils. The organizations getting this right aren’t asking “which tasks can we automate?” but rather “which workflows should stop existing?” They’re not building faster clerks; they’re designing orchestrators. And just as railroads forced the invention of time zones to enable continental coordination, agentic AI demands new standards for how autonomous systems interact, escalate, and adapt. The experts who came of age optimizing discrete processes are precisely the wrong guides for this journey – their deep process knowledge blinds them to systemic transformation.
— Platforms, AI, and the Economics of BigTech, 12m, #coordination, #transformation, #governance
Small Magic
Remember that sweet spot when your engineering team was around 30-50 people? Large enough to ship meaningful work, small enough that you knew everyone’s name and could make decisions over coffee instead of committee? Turns out there’s hard science behind that nostalgia. Once you cross the 50-engineer threshold, communication paths explode from 300 to over 1,200, and suddenly 42% of engineering time evaporates into organizational overhead. The cruel irony? Career advancement rewards empire-building over effectiveness – directors managing 80 engineers earn more than those managing lean, productive teams of 30. Yet WhatsApp served billions with 30 engineers before their $19B exit. Instagram conquered the world with 13. Ghost and Obsidian are crushing VC-funded competitors with tiny teams. The pattern is clear: constraints breed creativity, small teams maintain ownership, and sometimes the best growth strategy is refusing to grow. While everyone else is asking “How can we scale bigger?” the smart money might be asking “How can we stay small?” Because in the race between coordination overhead and actual work getting done, physics always wins – and those communication paths multiply faster than your productivity ever will.
— Manager Stories, 7m, #teamsize, #engineering, #scaling
Agency Unlocked
Stop waiting for perfect conditions to make things happen. The fundamental trait separating top performers from everyone else isn’t talent, experience, or even intelligence – it’s high agency. While low-agency folks reflexively explain why something can’t be done (“we don’t have resources,” “nobody’s done this before”), high-agency individuals ask “how can I make this work?” They’re the ones who treat “impossible” as a puzzle to solve, not a stop sign. Think of your team in four quadrants: Game Changers (high talent + high agency) who drive transformative impact, Frustrated Geniuses (talent without initiative) stuck waiting for permission, Go-Getters (agency without deep expertise) who figure it out as they go, and Cogs in the Wheel who stick to job descriptions. Companies actively hunt for this trait because high-agency people multiply organizational effectiveness without constant hand-holding. You can spot them by their intellectual contradictions (the CFO who DJs on weekends), their default assumption that problems are solvable, and most tellingly, who you’d call if everything went sideways. The best part: agency isn’t genetic – it’s built through deliberate practice. Start by focusing on your circle of influence instead of your circle of concern, replacing “I can’t because” with “how can I,” and taking ownership of outcomes even when they’re technically not your responsibility.
— Tech World With Milan, 8m, #leadership, #agency, #performance
Stop Asking
Stop asking your manager “How can I help?” and start showing them. Wes Kao’s OAV framework – Observe, Assert, Validate – flips the script on managing up. Instead of dumping the mental load on your boss to figure out where you fit, you do the heavy lifting first. Watch for gaps in your Monday meetings, notice the manual processes eating hours, spot the recurring pain points. Then come with a solution, not a question. “I noticed we’re burning two hours weekly on manual data pulls. I can build an automated dashboard in half a day. Sound good?” That’s the difference between operators who add value and those who add to the inbox. The framework is deceptively simple: Observe what’s broken or inefficient, Assert your proposed fix with specifics, then Validate you’re on track. It’s not about avoiding questions – it’s about doing the thinking first. Your manager shouldn’t have to calculate the ROI of accepting your help, wonder if you have the skills, or worry about the time cost of bringing you up to speed. When you show up with observations and solutions, you transform from someone who needs managing into someone who manages up. The best part? You don’t need permission to start observing today.
— Wes Kao’s Newsletter, 4m, #managing-up, #leadership, #productivity
Async Team Coordination to Stop Drowning in “Work About Work”
Endless meetings, status updates, and context scavenger hunts are keeping your team from real work. Steady eliminates coordination chaos by delivering personalized, real-time guidance on what’s happening, what’s next, and what needs attention.
Stay in control of your team’s story while your people focus on creating and solving – not coordinating.
Learn more at runsteady.com.
