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.
Promotion Insurance
At big tech companies, your manager can’t promote you if they don’t know what you’re doing — and they won’t know unless you tell them. One ex-Googler shares a simple formula: treat your 1:1s like performance marketing. Show impact. Track metrics. Bring receipts. It’s not about bragging, it’s about narrative clarity — weekly story beats that make your value unmistakable when promo season hits. If you’re waiting for someone else to notice, you’re already losing.
Editor’s note: if you are Steady user, here’s an agent that will ship you a “brag doc” at the end of every week.
— Business Insider, 5m, #career, #management, #promotion
Humans Still Required
AI can forecast trends, summarize notes, and even write convincing PRDs—but it can’t (and shouldn’t) replace the deeply human parts of product management. This piece by Saielle DaSilva reminds us that successful PMs don’t just ship features—they synthesize context, wrangle ambiguity, navigate org dynamics, and advocate for users with conviction. Those tasks require judgment, empathy, and often political savvy—things no LLM can fake. In short: AI can accelerate your work, but it can’t decide what’s worth doing, or why it matters. That’s your job.
— Mind the Product, 6m, #productmanagement, #ai, #leadership
Respect Over Rapport
You don’t have to “click” with a great manager. In fact, the best ones might never be your drinking buddies—but you’ll trust them anyway. This piece nails what really matters in management: consistency, fairness, follow-through, and a clear sense of standards. A great manager doesn’t chase being liked—they create a safe, high-performance space where you know where you stand, feedback is clear, and drama doesn’t stand a chance. Even if your personalities don’t align, you’ll leave better than you came.
— Data Science Collective, 6m, #management, #leadership, #culture
Boring and Brilliant
In a world hypnotized by hype cycles and resume-driven development, Moxie Marlinspike makes a pitch for engineering that’s not sexy—but stable. The best engineers, he argues, don’t chase cleverness. They build boring systems that work, scale, and stay up. The magic isn’t in the language or the framework du jour; it’s in choosing dull over dazzling when it matters most. Reliability beats novelty. “A good engineer is someone who sees beauty in simplicity and strength in restraint,” Moxie writes. It’s a refreshing sermon against overengineering in an era addicted to complexity theater.
— Moxie.org, 6m, #engineering, #craft, #software
Teamwork for the AI Era
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