Sublime

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

Then one day, one of the developers came in with a Harvard Business Review paper from 1986, written by two Japanese business professors, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. It was titled, “The New New Product Development Game.” Takeuchi and Nonaka had looked at teams from some of the world’s most productive and innovative companies: Honda, Fuji-X

“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

They discovered that their primary customer, very seasoned developers with 7–15 years of experience, wanted to scale up their skills but not on a predetermined career path.