The Linear Method: Building Products with Craft and Quality

Learn how Linear launches features early to a select group of users for feedback, iterating rapidly based on real-world usage.

“We are actually very okay like pushing things out to ourselves and into for like a small small group of customers.”

Discover how to create a company culture that values quality and craft, where employees are empowered to contribute to design and user experience.

“With the craft it's always starts with like people need to care about it like if it's not valued in the company then it's very hard to do for anyone to do.”

Analyze how design and user experience can be a key differentiator in competitive markets, especially as a space becomes more crowded.

“The more it matters the more the design matters.”

Understand the value of building opinionated software with good defaults to increase productivity and focus.

“Productivity software should be opiated.”

Learn how to use cycles to focus teams on specific priorities and avoid distractions from an infinite list of tasks.

“Cycles is just a way to say that like for the next week or the next two weeks we're going to work on these things”

Understand the rationale behind Linear's limited use of product managers and the importance of engineers and designers taking on product responsibilities.

“When you build a team and you start creating this very specific roles for everything um where like I think that often the BM can be the one that like figuring things out and like making decisions and guiding the team but they're not the ones like building the feature so they're not there like looking at it”

Learn how Linear hires for product sensibility, looking for individuals with opinions about products and the ability to communicate effectively.

“You really need to spend more time on it and like basically you cannot really interview Engineers only for the engineering skills you also have to interview them for like the product skills”

Discover strategies for staying focused on core priorities and avoiding distractions from side quests and external pressures.

“What you should be focusing on when you build a startup is like talk to customers build the product exercise.”

Implement paid work trials as an interview technique

“we do with all of the employees we've done like a bait work trial”

Implement a survey and manual selection process for a private beta period that helps you define and talk to early adopters.

“We had this weit list of people on the wait list there was like few survey questions like what kind of tools you use today”

Instead of trying to focus on all types of customers define your key customers that you want to focus on, and focus your key features on those customer's needs

“we want to like address the whole market and not just like these early stage customers”