Designing for the Developers

Linear’s founders want to do more than support better software creation. They want to bring back a sense of dignity to software creation, a job that today, Saarinen observes, can feel disconnected from a larger purpose. They want software engineers to feel satisfaction with and control over their work, something overreliance on project managers ha

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“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

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One of the things people value about Scandinavian design is that, generally, objects don’t draw attention to themselves. They are plain, functional and offer the user something “honest,” in Saarinen’s assessment. Linear’s leap forward in software development is that it is designed to be honest in this way, to literally not draw attention to itself

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Today hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people might develop a piece of software. This has led to two things, Saarinen says: a focus on process over product, and removing engineers from positions of influence. “I think people get too focused on the different frameworks and processes,” he says, “and you start to forget, what are you actually doing?

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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

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