How Steady works
What is Steady?
Steady is an async coordination platform for teams. It runs in the background, distilling plans & progress from tools, teams, and people into tailored summaries that give everyone the clarity they need to make outstanding products together.
How Steady works
1. Steady pulls in activity from your tools
Steady works in the background, automatically organizing key activity from all of your tools —meetings, pull/merge requests, new issues, etc — and connects it to written summaries for maximum context.
2. Quick, human-written updates fill in context
Smart Check-ins and Live Goals collect plans & progress on a regular cadence. An activity-aware, AI-enhanced editor makes it quick and easy to share progress, so you can focus on what’s next.
3. AI summaries get everyone up to speed, fast
Written updates and activity from tools get distilled into personalized, context-dense summaries. No meetings, hunting for info, or waiting for answers. Just pure context, and effortless async coordination. entire companies aligned with summary-level insight into where things stand.
Steady is built on the principles of Continuous Coordindation, breaking alignment work down into a set of structured, automated async communication loops. Check-ins are used for daily loops to keep teams coordinated and Live Goals are used for weekly/bi-weekly/monthly loops to keep teams and entire companies aligned with summary-level insight into where things stand.
Smart Check-ins
Smart Check-ins are one of the core tools in Steady. Their purpose; keep individual teams in tight sync without daily stand-ups or status meetings. Here’s how they work:
- ⏰ People get reminders to check in via email, Slack, or Teams.
- 🤔 They answer three key questions; what they worked on previously, what they’re working on next, and if they’re blocked or not. An activity-aware, AI-enhanced editor makes reporting on progress fast.
- 🤖 Steady adds relevant activity from connected tools, and pushes the check-ins to their teammates. Team Highlights summarize what’s next so that everyone can get up to speed on the broad strokes in seconds.
That’s all there is to it. No standups or status meetings, no missing context, no having to remind people for updates. Just complete context, in minutes a day.
Live Goals
Where Smart check-ins keep individual teams in tight sync, Live Goals keep multiple teams and stakeholders in sync at big-picture fidelity. Here’s how they work:
- 🎯 Create a structured set of Live Goals — assigning owners, contributors, and the teams involved for each — to build a canonical source of truth for who’s doing what and why.
- ⏰ Goal owners get reminders to post progress updates on a regular cadence (weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly). Updates collect confidence, progress, and a quick written update for instant-read and in-depth progress snapshots.
- 📢 Goal updates are automatically delivered to all of the teams and people involved, via their Daily Digest, team chat, and/or email.
The end result is a live 30,000ft view of plans and progress, and a simple, reliable, noise and meeting-free way to keep teams and stakeholders aligned.
Benefits
Using Steady means less meetings and more context for everyone, but Steady is particularly impactful for managers who regularly have to synthesize progress from their teams and report out to stakeholders. Smart check-ins take care of the synthesis part, and Live goals make it simple and straightforward to regularly share updates with everyone who needs to be in the loop.
- Stronger cross-team alignment. Steady focuses your teams around a shared vision where everyone knows what to do and why. The result is improved cross-team collaboration, less infighting, and stronger performance across the board. You'll always have the information you need to respond to questions and requests from other teams, saving you from interrupting or "shoulder tapping" your team for updates and info.
- No surprises, smooth projects. Steady's Live Goals provide a live, high-level view of progress and confidence that eliminates surprises. Clear intention-setting minimizes duplicate work and helps you course correct proactively.
- Better engagement & morale. One of your responsibilities as a manager is keeping your team engaged and morale high. With more heads down time, more flexibility, less busy work & overhead, and a clear vision of how everyone's work fits into the big picture, your team has a recipe for strong engagement and high-performance.
- Higher productivity through removing meetings. When you consider the impact of a typical meeting, you realize just how costly they are to productivity. By eliminating the ramp-down, meeting time, and spin-up, your team gets unbroken focus time to make meaningful progress on what matters.