Async communication is easy to accomplish these days. Too easy.
Slack, MS Teams, videos with Loom, and good 'ole email do a great job at blasting out messages for consumption now or later.
Workplace from Meta, dubbed a “business communication tool,” also facilitated async messaging pretty well. That is until this week when Meta announced it was shutting down the service.
But async communication, while touted as a comprehensive collaboration solution, isn’t enough for the complex needs of modern software product teams anyway.
Aligning people and teams to build great products means structuring communication to serve a higher cause: coordination.
When orgs are truly coordinated, everyone shares the same mental model for the who, what, when, where, and why behind any project or collaborative effort. Projects go sideways when the mental models drift from person to person or team to team, no matter how many communiques fly over the wires.
If you’ve been in tech for any length of time, I bet you’ve seen this drift first-hand.
With modern work, in which people work across a variety of physical locations and schedules and rely on async communication, staying coordinated is super hard. There’s simply not enough structure embedded in ad-hoc chats or posts to truly align people and teams.
We built Steady as an async coordination platform to solve this problem.
Steady runs in the background, distilling plans and progress from tools, teams, and people into tailored summaries. This gives everyone the clarity — a shared mental model — for working together to build outstanding software products.
It will be easy to replace the async communication methods that Workplace provided. Slack or MS Teams are good options, and Steady integrates with them.
But whether you used Workplace or not, now’s a good time to take stock of the async problem you really have to solve - it’s coordination, not just communication.
Steady trials are free, our company SOC2 Type 2 certified, and we integrate with all of the tools you’re using already. Give it a try or talk to our sales team, and join thousands of other teams succeeding with Steady.
