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.
Balancing Autonomy and Accountability
Managing tech professionals is like being a referee in a game where half the players think they invented the rules and the other half refuse to acknowledge that rules exist. MIT Sloan’s new framework cuts through the mythology surrounding technical talent — those brilliant (and sometimes insufferable) humans who build our digital future but occasionally struggle with basic concepts like “meetings” and “other people’s opinions.” The core insight: stop treating engineers like mystical unicorns and start managing them like the complex professionals they are. This means establishing clear roles, providing regular feedback instead of annual performance theater, and understanding what actually motivates someone beyond free snacks and ping-pong tables. The sweet spot lies in balancing their need for autonomy with collaborative accountability, giving them ownership while ensuring they’re not building a rocket ship when you needed a bicycle. Smart managers learn to read their team’s intrinsic versus extrinsic motivators, pair complementary strengths, and resist the urge to confuse project management tools with actual people management.
— MIT Sloan, 4m, #leadership, #engineering, #management
AI’s Enterprise Revolution
The sacred giants of enterprise software — SAP, Salesforce, Oracle — have ruled their kingdoms for decades through sheer customer lock-in and migration hell. But AI is dismantling their moats brick by brick. With AI’s ability to bring structure to unstructured data and to generate custom integration and data transformation scripts in domain-specific languages, it is now much easier to migrate enterprise SoR data to new systems and build new integrations. The old rule that you couldn’t unseat these titans is crumbling as foundation models make data migration 90% faster and cheaper. Meanwhile, AI-native upstarts like Steady aren’t just offering better software — they’re automating the soul-crushing manual work that surrounds these systems. Sales reps no longer manually entering CRM notes. Financial analysts freed from routine number-crunching. Developers liberated from wasteful standup meetings. The $400 billion systems-of-record market is transforming into systems-of-action, where your enterprise software doesn’t just store data, it acts on it intelligently. The timing couldn’t be better: legacy contracts are expiring, C-suites are demanding AI functionality, and customers are finally seeing 10x value propositions that justify the switching pain.
— Bessemer Venture Partners, 8m, #ai, #enterprise, #transformation
EM Quadrants
Thiago Ghisi just dropped a framework that cuts through the “she’s hands-off” and “he’s too controlling” noise plaguing engineering management feedback. Drawing from Carl Jung’s archetypal psychology and organizational research, he maps engineering managers across two axes: how they handle change (stability vs. transformation) and where they focus their energy (people vs. execution). The result: four distinct quadrants that reveal how managers create leverage, not just what tasks they complete. Unlike existing frameworks that break down as careers scale, like the “Tech Lead EM” who becomes irrelevant at M3+ level, or the “Delivery EM” identity that stalls out, these archetypes persist across company sizes and career stages. Ghisi critiques industry giants like Pat Kua’s five types and Will Larson’s four, arguing they describe transitional roles rather than enduring leadership modes. His research-backed alternative focuses on unconscious projections: how people naturally perceive leaders in moments of uncertainty, conflict, and change. The framework promises to replace vague management critiques with precise archetypal language, helping teams discuss leadership patterns with the clarity we use for technical architecture decisions.
— Refactoring, 12m, #management, #archetypes, #leadership
Good Micromanagement
Forget everything you’ve heard about “hands-off” leadership. The startup world’s biggest taboo — micromanagement — might actually be the secret weapon your team needs. Rippling’s COO says it best: “I’m not a micromanager, but I’m microinterested.” First Round surveyed leaders from Apple, Stripe, Uber, and other tech giants who’ve learned to wield the dreaded “M-word” as a precision tool, not a sledgehammer. The gist: use it to model excellence, dive deep when data looks fishy, and maintain quality bars—then zoom back out once trust is built. Stripe’s first marketer credits “red pen holders” and systematic reviews for maintaining brand consistency at billion-dollar scale. Apple’s engineering leaders fill “boxes with ideas” instead of barking orders. The lesson isn’t about breathing down necks; it’s about knowing when to porpoise between the surface and the depths. The real management crime isn’t micromanaging — it’s under-managing talented people who need your context and guidance to ship their best work.
— First Round Review, 12m, #management, #leadership, #delegation
Context Multiplier 📹
Steady’s Echoes feature just got more powerful: now you can share those automated context reports across your entire team, turning individual insights into collective intelligence. Instead of every manager spending 30 minutes digging through GitHub, Jira, or Slack to prep for meetings, one well-crafted Echo can deliver the same critical updates to everyone who needs them. Set up an Echo to track “all merged PRs this week” or “goals that are slipping,” then share it with stakeholders, skip redundant status meetings, and watch coordination overhead evaporate. When context flows automatically to everyone who needs it, teams stop playing information telephone and start moving faster.
— Steady, 3m, #automation, #coordination, #context
Teamwork for the AI Era
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With Steady, teams deliver better work 5X faster, without tedious meetings, misalignment, or coordination chaos.
Learn more at steady.space.
