"Building Product at Linear" with Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear (1/2)

I'm very big on radically simplifying products by removing features that don't carry their own weight.

These days, we have more resources and people, but we still force constraints. We make sure to have only one or two people working on a product at a time. And we always keep features to a minimum. Boxing ourselves in this way prevents us from creating bloated products.

“The fundamental thing that Linear did differently was this idea of being highly opinionated,” she says. “They understood that, the truth is, most companies have no idea what the right software development process is,” Zhan says. “The subset who do would much prefer focusing on building their product than dedicating time to shaping this process—cu

But Linear is a rebuttal to Jira. It is notably fast and only minimally customizable, defined by its meticulous design—in the fonts and colors, but also in the logic of how the product functions. Built for Agile workflows, Jira is exhaustively customizable in a way that some engineers find onerous. In contrast, the first version of Linear was desi