It was a big year for Steady and our mission to cut the coordination tax and multiply speed-to-impact for our customers, starting with the launch of Steady itself! Along the way we baked in AI, expanded integrations, and generally added and refined ways for teams and people to get on the same page fast—allowing teammates to not only keep tabs on what happened, but to act proactively towards shared outcomes. Read on for all of the details…
🚀 Status Hero to Steady
In January, we launched Status Hero 2.0 as Steady—a reimagined platform built for the modern workplace, where people and teams work fluidly across schedules and physical locations. With a fresh name, a new domain at steady.space, and a methodology called Continuous Coordination, Steady is the new standard for autonomous team coordination.
Designed to keep teams productive, engaged, and aligned without the toil and time suck of traditional coordination, Steady distills human insight and hard data to give everyone precisely the context they need, when they need it, automatically. Along the way, Steady uniquely balances accountability and autonomy — a counterweight to the proliferation of “bossware” and productivity-killing micromanagement.
Steady’s flagship features include the Daily Digest, a streamlined feed for updates and action items, and Unified Views that seamlessly integrate data across teams and goals. From actionable notifications to improved navigation and PWA support, Steady is more than an upgrade—it’s an umbrella solution for teams that want to build better products faster without burning out.
🔄 Continuous Coordination
With the launch of Steady, we also worked with customers and other tech leaders to develop Continuous Coordination, a set of seven principles for tackling modern work. Steady the product automates the concepts of Continuous Coordination.
Each of the principles is powerful on its own, but combined, they are a proven force for achieving and sustaining high levels of productivity, work quality, and meaningful engagement. Even better, the principles are self-reinforcing: the more your organization uses them, the easier they are to apply.
To learn more about Continuous Coordination, or better yet contribute, see our open-source whitepaper. We’d love your input.
🙂 Teams and People
In March, we launched a new Teams & People area because as organizations grow, it gets harder and harder to keep track of who does what, who’s working with who, and what every team has going on. That leaves team members searching across unknown teams for the right points-of-contact, and managers often unaware of all the work happening across the organization.
With Teams & People, you can quickly see everything at a glance and know who’s a part of what efforts. Unlike static docs in Notion or the org chart in your HR tool, this is a live team directory that’s reflective of how people are actually getting work done together. Along with the directory, new team profiles showcase everything happening at the team-level, from progress made on high-level goals to daily check-ins.
💬 New Slack and Microsoft Teams apps
In April we launched new versions of our Slack and Microsoft Teams apps. The new apps make it easier than ever to keep everyone in the loop. Turn them on for your account once, and they just work, for every team and every person. Everyone gets the context and reminders they need, right where they’re already looking.
The new apps use direct messages exclusively, which means two things:
- Everyone gets personalized notifications and reminders.
- Nobody has to deal with extra noise, or notifications that aren’t relevant to them. Our goal is to tame noise and chaos, not add to it.
The app sends reminders for check-ins and goal updates, and notifications for everything you’re involved in; check-ins and blockers from teammates, relevant goal updates, comments, and more.
🪟 Open Teams
We’re big believers in the benefits of working in the open, which is why we added Open Teams to Steady in May. Before, check-ins, goals, and goal updates were only visible to the members of those teams. If you wanted broader visibility, you had to add everyone to a large team or involve every team in a goal.
Open Teams lets your Steady teams match your in-real-life teams, and gives people broad cross-team visibility without adding any notification noise. Even better, Open Teams helps Live Goals reach their full potential. Now you can build a live single source of truth, from a company goal down, where everyone can see how their piece fits into the bigger picture and where things stand. It’s a game-changer for cross-team coordination.
⚡️ Team Highlights & Quick Fill
In June, we launched our first set of features leveraging AI, Team Highlights and Quick Fill.
Team Highlights are team-level summaries of intentions that help you get up to speed on the big picture fast. Everyone’s intentions get distilled down to single sentence summaries, and activity stats give you a broad sense of what happened.
Quick fill is all about lowering the cost of contributing which makes it more likely that people will check in and post updates, and faster when they do. It summarizes activity Steady knows about, like pull requests or updates from child goals, so contributors can focus on the things computers can only guess at; figuring out what the next best thing to work on is.
💅 UI refresh
In July, we shipped a UI refresh that’s cleaner, more consistent, and more content-focused. We also completely overhauled iconography in the app, and applied a liberal amount of polish everywhere.
👀 Follow teams and goals
Are you the manager of an engineering team but need to know what’s going with design? In August, we made it easy to follow other teams and Live Goals in Steady to get updates without having to be a member of that team or goal.
Once you follow a team or goal, you get updates in your Daily Digest and receive notifications in email/Slack/MS Teams, just like the teams you’re a member of. No more searching around for information or context, just read your feed.
🧑💻 GitHub PR review activities
PR reviews are a significant part of many teams’ workflows, so in September, we updated our GitHub integration to include PR review activity automatically. Review requests, approvals, and comments are now included in check-ins and displayed on the activity feed, giving everyone complete context on what’s happening in GitHub.
🧾 Read receipts
In September we added read receipts. They live right next to comments on check-ins and goal updates, and show who read the entry and when they last read it. No more guessing about who is reading your updates; now you know.
📚 New docs & guides
In September we launched a new, custom docs site that we built from scratch. It works better, it looks better, and it’s got a whole new set of guides tailored to different roles. So whether you’re a contributor, manager, or leader, we’ve got a guide dedicated to showing you exactly how to make the most out of Steady.
🔔 Your notifications, your way
In October, we rolled out new notification settings that give you even more control over how and where you receive notifications. Whether it’s for check-ins, goal updates, comments, or mentions, you can toggle notifications for each activity type. Additionally, you can now fine-tune where you get these alerts. Choose any mix of email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams, so you can stay up to speed without adding extra noise.
🏃 Performance improvements
Steady is all about giving you maximum context, fast. As part of that mission, in October we shipped some major front-end and back-end performance improvements that deliver 3x faster response times and significantly faster page rendering. It’s all about making sure you and your team can stay focused and in the flow.
💬 Jira integration updates
Jira issue comments are important context for understanding where things stand, and including them in Steady had been a top request. In November, we added support for Jira comments so now you can see when comments are added to issues in Jira, as well as what was said. We also improved all Jira activity to include the full context of what changed, and how.
💡 Echoes beta
Echoes is our latest AI-powered feature in Steady. It’s all about giving you the context you need, when you need it, on a regular schedule. Ask about anything going on at work, pick a delivery schedule, and Echoes pulls data from check-ins, goals, and your activity integrations to deliver fresh answers again and again.
You can do things like automate 1:1 prep, get a weekly summary of every PR that merged last week, and a whole lot more. Want a monthly report of any goals that slip off track, or just a high level summary of all goal updates? Echoes can do that. Want a weekly update on who’s going to be out this week? Echoes can do that. If there’s any information about work that you need on a regular basis that you manually gather today, Echoes can do the heavy lifting for you.
In December we rolled out our public beta. If your account isn’t enabled with Echoes yet and you want to try it, just reply to this email and we’ll get you sorted.
🎉 What’s coming in 2025
We’re just getting started! In 2025, we’ll be doubling down on making Steady even more indispensable for modern teams. Expect deeper AI-powered coordination tooling to help you stay ahead of the curve, more and richer integrations with your favorite tools and data sources, and a standalone desktop app for seamless access to Steady wherever you work. We’re also adding more predictive insights to give you the edge in planning and decision-making. And that’s just the beginning—there’s so much more in store to help your teams coordinate smarter, faster, and with less effort. Stay tuned!
— The team at Steady
