You’re reading The Steady Beat, a weekly round-up of hand-picked articles for people who coordinate teams and work, like engineering managers, design directors, product managers, project leaders, team facilitators, and department heads. Brought to you by the team at Steady.
State of Teams
Atlassian’s 2025 State of Teams report delivers a tough love message for modern teams drowning in data but starving for direction. Despite AI hype, 98% of execs admit their teams aren’t using it effectively. Why? Scattered info, unclear goals, and a meeting-addicted culture. But the highest-performing teams? They’ve found religion in centralized knowledge, async updates, goal alignment, and AI that actually helps. The future belongs to teams who ditch digital chaos and embrace a system of work that makes information actionable, not just abundant. Turns out, success isn’t about having more tools—it’s about using them like you mean it.
— Atlassian: State of Teams 2025, 17m, #teamwork, #ai, #productivity
State of Work
Forget Uncle Sam—your productivity has its own IRS. Asana’s 2024 State of Work Innovation report drops a brutal audit on the modern workplace, exposing four “invisible taxes” draining 53% of knowledge workers’ time: the Connectivity Tax (disjointed teams), the Velocity Tax (process and tech bottlenecks), the Resilience Tax (toxic coworkers and bad change management), and the Capacity Tax (meeting overload, tool fatigue, and burnout-by-collaboration). Based on data from over 13,000 global workers, the report reads like a wake-up call: if you’re still coordinating work like it’s 2015, you’re bleeding talent, time, and results. Smart orgs are slashing their tax bill with fewer tools, more guidance, better AI, and a dose of asynchronous sanity.
— Asana: State of Work Innovation, 24m, #future-of-work, #productivity, #organizational-design
State of Tech
In the 32nd volume of its Technology Radar, Thoughtworks does what it does best: sift through the hype to spotlight the real, the promising, and the “please don’t” of modern software development. This edition zeros in on supervised AI coding agents (yes, AI that writes code—but with a leash), evolving observability for chaotic architectures (LLMs included), and the fast-changing frontier of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). It also gives a firm thumbs up to practices like data product thinking, model distillation, and fuzz testing, while giving side-eye to AI-induced complacency and enterprise-scale agile frameworks like SAFe. In short: a human-curated map through the AI-fueled jungle of 2025 tech.
— Thoughtworks: Technology Radar Vol 32, 28m, #ai-tools, #software-practices, #developer-experience
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