Today's guest is Henry Poydar.
Henry is CEO and founder at Steady, with more than 25 years of experience in tech leadership roles.
With Henry, we talked about continuous coordination, an open source framework he co-created, providing a set of principles and practices for running modern, effective engineering teams.
🎙️ Episode
You can watch the full episode on Youtube:
Or listen to it on Spotify, Apple, Overcast, or your podcast app of choice.
🥇 Interview Summary
If you are a 🔒 paid subscriber 🔒 you will find my own summary of the interview below.
It’s the 10-minute, handcrafted takeaways of what we talked about, with timestamps to the relevant video moments, for those who don’t have time to sit through the 1-hour chat.
Here is the agenda:
🏗️ Henry’s Journey (02:15)
🔄 Continuous Coordination principles (13:41)
👥 How to implement Continuous Coordination (30:00)
🚀 Trends in engineering teams (37:55)
🤖 AI's impact on software development (47:24)
Let's dive in 👇
1) 🏗️ Henry’s Journey (02:15)
Henry shared his journey in tech, which spans over 25 years.
His experience ranges from being a developer to holding leadership roles like VP of Engineering and CTO in various companies, including startups and public corps.
A pivotal moment in Henry's career came during his time at Constant Contact, where he faced the challenge of integrating a startup's technology into a large, legacy system.
This experience highlighted the complexity of communication in larger orgs and inspired him to tackle this problem.
After leaving Constant Contact, Henry created Status Hero, a simple tool for team check-ins. Status Hero became extremely successful, especially during the pandemic, but it only solved part of the coordination problem. This eventually led to the development of Steady, a more comprehensive solution built around the principles of Continuous Coordination 👇
2) 🔄 Continuous Coordination principles (13:41)
Continuous Coordination is an open-source framework providing principles and practices for running modern engineering teams. There are seven key principles, and we discussed three of them on the show:
Keeping a steady beat 🥁
This principle is about adding structure to asynchronous coordination. It involves two loops:
Small loop — creating a small, frequent loop for team-level communication (similar to async stand-ups)
Big loop — establishing a larger loop for updates on objectives or goals
A successful steady beat avoids the "alignment trap" of either too many meetings or complete absence of synchronization.
