Getting started

Three approaches to start using Continuous Coordination with your team.

1. Practices-only

The Continuous Coordination practices are designed for incremental adoption, and each practice is flexible enough to meet you where you’re at. They’re practices after all, not a prescriptive playbook. No asking your marketing team to start using story points or otherwise trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Each practice builds on one another, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t get benefits from adopting a single practice. For example, you might start with Practice 6: Write it down. The benefits of a writing-first culture will emerge regardless of whether or not you adopt the other practices.

However, the keystone practice that puts the continuous in Continuous Coordination is Practice 1: Keep a steady beat. Keep a steady beat relies heavily on automation, and if you’re not using approach 2 or 3 below, you’re going to have to get creative with your existing tools to automate as much as possible. You need 3 things:

1. Consistent reminders - asking people to rely on proactively remembering that they need to check in or write a goal story update is setting yourself up for failure.
2. Consistent format - the makeup of the two loops in Continuous Coordination isn’t freeform; each is a statement of intent, and one or more updates on progress against that intent.
3. Consistent place - updates need to land in a single, noise-free place where people know to read them. If people can’t find or don’t read updates, the whole exercise is pointless.

This could be as simple as embedding the practice within your existing daily standup, leveraging calendar reminders, setting up specific Slack channels, etc. There are lots of options here depending on the tools you already use.

Why you should pick this option: You think CoCo might work for you, but aren’t ready to make a larger investment without seeing some results first.

2. Practices + DIY CoCo server

The second option is to run the practices against a dedicated Continuous Coordination server. You can use our reference headless server, or build your own implementation against the Continuous Coordination schema. Out of the box, the reference server tackles two core needs (consistent format, consistent place), but it’s not a turnkey solution. There’s no authentication, no reminders, no GUI, etc.

In practice, using the reference server with a tool like Claude might look something like this:

• Stand up the server and put it behind a service like Tailscale.
• Create one or more skills that teach Claude how to interact with the API that the server provides.
• Have team members create scheduled tasks that use those skills to summarize context that’s pushed to the server, and walk them through providing updates on a schedule.

Aside from addressing two out of the three core needs, a CoCo server is a must-have if you’re running autonomous AI agents and want them to be successful over the long haul. Agents can participate in the two coordination loops alongside the rest of your team, and get all the same benefits.

Why you should pick this option: you want to adopt Continuous Coordination in full, but you don’t have budget right now, or have very specific implementation requirements.

3. Practices + Steady

Steady is a turnkey implementation of Continuous Coordination. It addresses all three core needs, and much more. Full GUI, deep integrations for Slack and Microsoft Teams, a robust API and MCP server, built-in agents for custom summaries, activity integrations that automatically correlate work product with written updates, etc.

Why you should pick this option: you want an end-to-end, turnkey solution for implementing Continuous Coordination.