Echoes (beta)
Echoes is 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.
Echoes takes time-consuming, energy-sapping context assembly off of your plate so you can focus on the work that matters.
Echoes is currently in open beta.
- Echoes will be 100% free for your entire account for the duration of the beta.
- Echoes will be a paid add-on after the beta ends. You won’t be under any obligation to purchase, and you'll never lose access to previously generated answers.
- Your feedback is welcomed and encouraged. See "Echoes feedback" below for more.
Using Echoes
To start using Echoes, select the waveform icon in the sidebar.
- Start an Echo by typing a question or prompt into the field, or by picking a question from the default set. You can use simple questions like “Who’s out next week on the product team?” or use more advanced prompts like “summarize the major progress that the Design and Dev teams made last week, and include any related pull requests”.
- Once you submit your question, Echoes will generate a preview so you can made sure the output is what you want/expect. If it’s not, you can make changes and the preview will update.
- Pick a weekly/bi-weekly/monthly cadence and the day and time you want answers delivered, and optionally edit the “short name” (which is displayed on answers).
- After you save your Echo, an initial answer will be delivered to your Digest. Future answers will be delivered to your Digest according to your schedule, and you’ll also get notified when that happens.
- All answers for an Echo are viewable in one place. Just click on the Echo in question from the list on the main Echoes view. This is also where you can edit, pause, or delete an Echo (via the ••• menu at the top of the page).
Echoes feedback
Open the ••• menu on any answer in your Digest, pick “Echoes feedback”, and choose one of the options. You can also send us a support request in-app at any time with your questions or feedback.
Best practices
- Unlike Claude or ChatGPT, Echoes isn't designed to give you "one off" answers. Echoes is all about automating context gathering for information you need weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.
- Keep Echoes specific. Instead of a single "tell me everything that's going on across every team" catch-all Echo, create more specific Echoes like "give me a progress report for the Design and Engineering teams".
- Start simple. Echoes is designed so that you don't need to be a prompt engineer to get great results.
- You have complete control over the output style. "Give a high-level progress report for the Development team" and "Give me a detailed progress report for the Development team, making sure to include summaries of all merged PRs" are both valid. You can even give more abstract instruction, like "Give me a high-level summary of what the Development team has worked on in the past week that is understandable for non-technical leadership. Focus on the product changes, not individual contributions."
Use cases
Put 1:1 prep on autopilot
If you’re a manager with direct reports, you know exactly how much of a time sink 1:1 prep can be. Echoes makes that number zero. Ask a question like “What did Jane work on last week?”, and set the delivery time for 15 minutes before your 1:1. Echoes will deliver a complete report of absolutely everything they did — including activity from all of your tools — week after week.
Get a bird’s eye view of what shipped
Let’s say you're an engineering manager on a busy team, and you need to keep tabs on everything that’s going out the door. Use a simple prompt like “list all the Github pull requests that were merged in the last 2 weeks” and set the cadence for every other week. Echoes will deliver a complete list of everything that’s been shipped, and include a summary of the changes for each PR. No digging through Github, no having to ask for updates.
Get alerted when goals start to slip
No manager likes to learn that their team won’t hit a goal until it’s too late. Write a prompt like “list any goals that are slipping, and summarize why”, and Echoes will review all of the goals you have access to, find the the ones that are slipping, and analyze the updates to give you a summary. Set the delivery time for every Monday, and never be caught off guard again.
Break down cross-functional silos
Let’s say you work on the marketing team. You need to know at a high level what the product team is working on, but wading through Jira takes too much time. With Echoes you can write a prompt like “give me a high-level summary of what the Design and Development teams worked on last week", and Echoes will put all the pieces together for you.
Data use and privacy
- No training on your data: We use enterprise-grade vendors to generate answers for Echoes, with contractual agreements to never use your data for training purposes.
- No permission leaks: Echoes can only access the data that people already have access to in Steady. There’s no risk of people seeing content they shouldn't.
- Human-sourced inputs: All inputs are human-generated, and therefore inherently more trustworthy than systems that encourage generative input.
- Auditable answers: Answers include links to the source material used to create them. You can always audit answers to verify that they’re correct and trustworthy.