How Linear Builds Product

Great thing about starting your own company that you can design the way you want it. Too many founders or companies fall in this trap following established playbooks or bring processes from other places. People also say that “it doesn’t work” or “it won’t scale”, which my response is well have you tried it? Have you tried to make it work? At @l... See more

“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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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 teams are currently structured by function (product, R&D, design, business, etc.), and different teams think about different layers of the company and stack. But all energy is directed toward improving the core product. We design objectives that translate to common top-level metrics and improve the user experience holistically. For example,... See more

We've been thinking a lot about this in the context of @linear. Linear is often described as "opinionated", but "purpose-built" is a much better way to describe it (h/t @karrisaarinen) Most issue trackers out there are general-purpose tools. They are endlessly flexible to support any use case. They treat task management as the end goal. Linear i... See more