Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product)

0:00 I think you see in the team at Liniar that a lot of people don't see, which is that there's not actually a trade-off between speed and quality. People talk about this as if there were a trade off because when they think about speed, the thing they over index on is like rushing or being sloppy. What they should be indexing on is being really competent. If you look at people who are like at the the pinnacle of their craft, you can basically tell how good the output is gonna be of their work product by How fast they're going. What does speed look like when you say it can be done quickly and high quality? What it really looks like is, you know, you have some rough time budget for how long you think something's gonna take. By the time 10% of it has passed, after week one, you have something that works, that tests some kind of key hypothesis internally. Imagine a criticism you all get. Over time, you'll probably become a bloated. Piece of software as well. When we examine this problem, we kind of look at, well, what feature requests can we debate and what kind of feature requests. Do we absolutely have to say no to the stuff that we absolutely have to say no to is the exact kind of thing that leads to this bloatedness that makes ICs kinda hate their lives. Something that your head of sale shared with me is how impressed he is with the way you ask questions on customer calls and just keep digging and digging until you get to something. My goal is to feel bad in the same way that customers feel bad.

1:14 Today my guest is Nan Yu. Nan is head of product at Linear. Which is one of the most beloved. most beautifully designed, and also the fastest growing BDB SaaS product out there today.

1:28 You rarely see the kind of love that people have for Linear for any enterprise B2B SAS product. And so there is a lot that we can learn from how Linear operates and how they build product. In my conversation with Nan. He shares a system that he uses for being creative and coming up with non-obvious solutions to customer problems. Why it's a red flag to him when PMs tell him there's a trade-off between speed and quality.

1:51 how he talks to customers in order to figure out the emotion that they want to avoid and then figure out the solution to avoiding that emotion. plus some killer advice on how to land a job, including how he landed his job at Linear and his previous mode, and so much more. If you have a desire to build a company or a product that's as beloved as Linear, this episode will give you a ton of tactics, and ways to change how you and your team operate. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously.

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4:56 Non, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm a longtime listener and and reader, so it's uh really a treat to be here. I wanna share something with you to kick off that I haven't shared with you yet, that I haven't shared with anyone. These results might have come out by the time this podcast comes up. But I'm running a survey right now that is I'm calling what's in your stack.

5:16 Where all my subscribers are asked What tools do you use most day to day? What tools do you love most? What tools do you hate? And one of the questions asked. was

5:28 What tool do you wish you could switch to if your IT department allowed you to? The number one answer by far is People want to switch from Jira to linear. Wow, I mean uh hopefully that means we're doing a good job. I think that's exactly what that means.

5:44 I'll read a couple quotes to give you a sense of what people are saying about linear. I doubt these are surprising to you, but this gives people a sense of why you're here and why I'm excited to extract as much wisdom as I can from you. So a couple quotes here. Linear is a joy to use as I interact with my engineering teams and I find inspiration in its design. Linear is simple to use, yet Powerful.

6:05 Linear design is obviously an industry benchmark, but moreover, the performance and speed is a massive productivity boost. I mean, it's really good to hear that because You know, in in a lot of ways that's what we're trying to do. You know, if you if think about like the Entire impetus behind why Linar was started. It's

6:22 Because you know, Cari was kind of like sitting at like Coinbase and Airbnb in these places and just you know, watching everyone around him struggle using the tools that uh they had available and like all these kind of incumbent tools and Just

6:37 You know, like seeing that it kinda made people Like kinda hate their day to day a little bit. And we all got into uh technology and and design and engineering, all this kind of stuff. Uh, because it was fun. Right, all of us started off like building stupid MySpace pages and and all of this these like side projects when when we were young.

6:56 Uh, and it started off as this fun thing that we do and we're like, wow, we could do this for a career. And then to have all of it. This kind of stuff uh put these big speed bumps into uh into our day to day workflow just uh was really was really sad. So that's what you know, that's why we started linear to sort of really bust through all of that. What I love about linear, I feel like it's a

7:13 Inspirational business because many people want to. I'm gonna build just a much better version of something and Often that doesn't actually work out. Often

7:24 Nobody cares enough. There's all these barriers and reasons people don't switch to something that's better. And linear isn't Amazing example of building an excellent product and actually succeeding. And There's a lot more to it than maybe than just building an awesome product. So that's what I'm excited to dig into and understand how you all operate.

7:40 And I guess just based on these results. To me this is the ultimate sign of product market fit. People like being sad they can't use a product in B to B enterprise software, especially. So Let's get into it.

7:52 First question I wanna get into is something that I think you see in the team at Linear Cs that a lot of people don't see, which is That There's not actually a trade off between speed and quality. I think a lot of people think this is uh just an innate fact.

8:06 And something I've heard you talk about is that's not actually true. And actually saw Patrick Halson tweet this exact That I'll read after you. I wanna hear your thoughts, but talk about what you've learned about how it There's maybe not actually the

8:18 trade off between speed and quality. People. Talk about it this as if there were a trade off, almost in kind of like a naive way. Because when they think about speed

8:28 the thing they over index on is is like rushing or being sloppy. And what they should be indexing on is being really competent. Or being like an expert. So if if you look at um

8:40 If you look at people who are like at the the pinnacle of their of their craft, right? It could be anything, could be like a chef or a programmer or you know, someone building houses or something. You can basically tell how good the output is gonna be. of their work product by how fast they're going. Right. They're going really fast and it's like they're obviously not like being sloppy and then leaving a mess all over the place. It's like yeah, well they they got there because This is just second nature to them.

9:04 And they're able to kind of go at a really rapid pace. And you know, try stuff. Uh and when we're building software, that's that's such a big Component. of how good the product is on the other side of it, which is like how many iterations we were able to do.

9:17 So the only way you're gonna get a bunch of iterations done and try different things and really feel out uh these different variations is by just going very fast. In terms of speed, is the speed there. Moving quickly on each of those iterations.

9:30 Like what does speed look like when you say it can be done quickly and High quality. What does speed look like? Uh speed what it really looks like is But you know, you have some

9:39 rough time budget for how long you think something's gonna take. And by the time ten percent of it has passed, you have a workable solution. Right. It's not like oh at the halfway point we have something That is maybe a candidate that we can play around with. It's like no no no like

9:54 After week one, you have something that works. That tests some kind of key hypothesis. internally. So that you can feel like is this thing actually uh panning out the way we expect it to, or is that we have some crazy incorrect assumption?

10:07 And You know, you don't want to wait till you're eighty percent done. to be able to make that kind of judgment because then it's just too late. Then you're you're pushing deadlines out and you're uh you know, you're making your marketing team very sad. Amazing. Okay. So the way you think is We gonna spend a month on this feature.

10:23 Let's get something workable we can start testing with potential users even internally. In the first Few days essentially in the first week. Yes. Yeah.

10:32 Yeah, I guess how how can you do that?'Ca i most teams can't do that. Most teams need to Research, design, build, okay, cool. We have something and when it's a month later. Well it allows you to To do that. I mean there's a lot of components of it. I think

10:45 having really good talent really helps, right? Having engineers who Uh don't get blocked by every single little design choice. you know, they they're they're happy to just make something workable, even if They don't feel comfortable with that. particular solution, they'll they'll just bust through it and uh and make something happen there.

11:03 Part of it is intent. You know, we don't have any expectation that the first version of it is gonna be great. Right. That's just that's just n that is not in the cards. Right. Like look, the first version of it is Our best guess.

11:15 in the general direction of what we want to actually ship in the end. And sometimes it works out. Sometimes wow, this first version was pretty good. Let's make some minor adjustments and we're and we're good to go. But there's no expectation there. So no one feels like they have to be a perfectionist and get everything like all sanded down and and and really uh you know, really into tough shape, right? It just has to Or can get the job done and and you know, kind of Validate or invalidate. our our major assumptions.

11:38 I'll read this quote from Patrick Alson. He tweeted this today as I was preparing for this interview, and he's the CO and founder of Stripe, if you're not familiar. Uh his tweet of increasingly believed that Good, cheap fast. Choose to maximiz devious misinformation spread by the slow.

11:54 In my experience, slow and expensive usually go together. Yeah, exactly. I mean use the the the contractor kind of a example. Like if you've someone's making modifications to your house and it's taking forever Like one, you're you're in a hotel and also the the the bills are adding up. Yeah.

12:08 The other example we used when we were chatting about this earlier is chess chess players. Uh I'm thinking of Magnus Carlson watching him. I think he was like number one in speed chest. In addition to just regular chess. And

12:20 What a microcosm of this point. Yeah, I I think that's uh that's the case in like, you know, Magnes and Hikaru and all those all those guys who are at the the top of their game, you know, they can They can go unbelievably fast. In fact, that's the that's the usual I mean, I I don't want to get too out of my depth with with chess, but the usual way you you uh try to make the game fair is you give them much, much less time, right, than someone who's uh not quite as strong of a player.

12:40 And and they'll they'll still win a lot of time too. So maybe just to close out this point and give someone something concrete they can do with this information, say they want to start moving faster while not Cutting quality. What do you think they can do? What's one thing they can start trying to work on and improving in the way they operate? I think it's really that um

13:00 that sort of attitude and point of view question, right? The sort of Understand and Uh Take the sort of Almost like controlled risk.

13:09 That the first version of this is not gonna be perfect. So it actually makes it a lot cheaper in many ways. It means you don't need a per pixel perfect design. It means you don't need to make sure that all of the little UI bugs and stuff like that are solved. Because none of that really matters, right? It has what matters is you have working software. that you can interact with and you can see if it feels good.

13:27 Does it actually solve the core problem? that uh is facing our users. You can take it back to users. You can even like let them into an early beta or something like that and get real Um

13:37 You know, validation there. And uh and to sort of really focus on Getting the the smallest kind of the shippable element like not not shippable in the sense of like I can actually put out the production.

13:47 But in the sense of like I can, you know, start learning from here. Just a question I imagine is in everyone's mind is what do you do with this first very ugly V one. Not ugly. Not not fully ready. Ha. Uh first version, is this something you're using internally to see if it's something? Is it something you have beta design partners with?

14:04 We have uh a sort of gradually increasing sort of circle of users that use every single feature. So by the time it hits uh GA by the time it gets released. It's been used by a lot of different users up to that point. So the first circle is just internal users. We

14:21 use linear every single day to, you know, to write software and do our own work. So you know, we have that kind of advantage. And then once we feel like it's good enough. Will put it into some Beta customer group. You again.

14:32 as early as we can in the process, right? We have to make sure that we don't end up corrupting people's data and it doesn't look hideous and that kind of stuff, but As long as it reaches that level of quality, we can uh we can release it to to sort of early access customers who can give us good feedback and Also just try to solve their problems with it. Right. If no one engages with it, if no one's using it, then you know, that's a pretty good signal that we didn't really hit the mark.

14:53 And then we have a couple of different beta audiences that we grow, and then the ultimate release obviously is for uh for GA where everyone gets it. That's an amazing answer. Okay, so secret number one to linear success. I'm gonna take some notes here. Is get uh new feature product ideas out to people

15:08 as early as possible, say in the t first ten percent of the amount of time you've allotted. And then uh release it kind of increasingly to more and more people uh to get feedback. Uh Like I think an implication here is just most wasted time is on

15:21 Building things nobody actually ends up wanting or using. And so the sooner you at least get directional sense of are you heading in a good direction, the faster it all goes. Yeah, totally. Imagine a criticism you all get.

15:33 Uh People are like, Yes, linear is so great, so beautiful, so much better than what's been out there for decades. But Over time, you will probably become a bloated piece of software as well. That's just the fate of enterprise software. You have to check all these checkboxes. IT teams need all these features.

15:49 And so there's always this like, Oh yeah, sure, you guys can operate this way for now. You have an amazing product for now, but It'll get Ugly and bloated. How do you think about avoiding that? I know it's something you spent a lot of time thinking about.

16:02 Maybe give us a glimpse into some of the conversations you have internally when There's these feature requests like oh I need single sign on with this thing and this button here. How do you think about what to add, what not to add, and how to add these features. To not make it bloated.

16:14 This question actually comes to us a lot from candidates that are interviewing with us. Right. Like when you go like hey, like do you have any questions for us? Like this is the question that we're gonna get. Right. So Um, we hear quite a lot. And uh and I it's very sensible for them to ask it, right?'Cause they they see, you know, sort of history. being kind of like l littered with the corpses of startups trying to compete in this space and and

16:36 N not making it. And I I think When we uh Examine this problem. we kind of look at well what kind of feature requests

16:46 Can we Debate and what kind of feature requests Do we absolutely have to say no to? And the the stuff that we absolutely have to say no to is Uh also the the exact kind of thing that leads to this kind of like bloatedness that you know makes ICs kinda hate their lives.

17:02 Uh and it's It's Very specific. It's customization features. Requested by middle managers. In order to make reporting a little bit easier.

17:13 At the cost of making I C Workflows worse. Right. Like it's like if it fits that description, we're just saying no. There's there's the there's no debate because we've already thought about it and this is the this is the thing that we can't we can't take a single step down this path. So I I think that's like

17:27 Honestly, one of the core promises. of linear is that we will not make this particular trade off. Right. So when you when you see people saying like

17:35 Wow, you know, linear is so much uh faster. It's so much easier to use, that it makes my my work so much more enjoyable. Like this is the reason because we have not taken a single step in this direction. Uh It's very Easy. For a PM to say yes to this kind of request.

17:50 Right. Because they're talking with all often they're talking with buyers, right? And kind of like B to B uh type of space they're talking about whoever the gatekeeper is and sales is putting pressure on them uh and they're saying like, hey, we really want this this one feature. It's gonna make our reporting like nicer. So like No, the the uh you know, the director's gonna be really excited by this and will definitely make a buying decision based off of this. And we have to kind of convince them that this is a false trade off.

18:12 Right, the the whole premise is wrong because the moment you start going down this path And you make Um You make the I C user experience worse. They're just gonna disengage.

18:21 Right. No one has to do this. Like if I'm an engineer, I get paid to write code. My performance review is based on my like code contribution. It's not based on like did I fill in all the tickets right. So I'm just not gonna do that part. Or I'm gonna do it very sporadically. And uh and then You know, I'm gonna just focus on

18:36 on my actual job. And then all your reporting is wrong because all the data is wrong and it's like sparse and You know, you you get you get situations where people will um You know, they'll they'll say like well there's here's a drop down field that someone put in here that's required. There's nine choices.

18:52 I don't know what any of them mean. So I'm just gonna pick one at random. I'm just always gonna pick the first one. Also, I'm gonna pray that my boss is not actually using this data to do any kind of uh reporting and that that has consequence because the data can't possibly be correct. So I I think for us it's like it's a very easy decision. When it comes to that. particular uh category feature request.

19:12 I love how simple and clear that is. Basically you all have a policy We will prioritize ICs over middle managers, especially that it's around reporting almost always, it sounds like Just wanna track what's happening. Yeah, exactly. It's always I wanna track what's happening. Well what do you want to track? Well I wanna track Uh which

19:28 you know, like w uh which uh version of the product this thing's uh tied to, you know, based on some some field information. It's like okay, like how is the person working on is supposed to even know that information. Well, it takes a five it takes like a five minute scavenger hunt every single time. It's like I don't think they're gonna do that, man. What I imagine happens, and I think why this is hard for most companies is there's an implication that you're turning down deals You're not uh

19:51 Adding that one feature that would close a massive million dollar sale. Uh very difficult to do. I imagine it helps a lot that I imagine the CO is very bought into this and There's this uh we will win long term. Uh holding the line on this.

20:04 Is that right? So it is, but I also think that's the thing. There's not as much pressure as As you would expect. Right, to do these kinds of things.

20:13 There there are basic scaling things like you know, we had to make like SAML and SIM and that kind of stuff. It's like, yeah, sure, we're gonna do those sorts of like keep the lights on type of work. But when it comes to work that's related to the actual you know, the actual business logic of of the the the apps like value proposition. What Buyers care about.

20:33 Is Is this gonna make their Team more. Effective. Right. That's the reason that they're making this buying decision in the first place, is that they're like, well, you know, the current situation we're in, and especially with larger companies, right? The current situation we're in is kind of a mess.

20:47 And if we can convince them that these types of things are actually the reason that it's a mess, then Like we can really kind of navigate them out of wanting them in the first place. Scott it. So there's an element of you or think you need this, but it turns out you'll be more successful and get everything you want.

21:03 Not getting this. Yeah, and it and maybe and the thing is it's not everything you want, right?'Cause like if c people come with a laundry list. And it's like one of those here's here's 10 things I want. You're like, do you want all those 10 things equally? They're like, No, actually, I don't. The first three are the things that really matter to us. If we saw the first three, then The other stuff we can negotiate on.

21:20 So our job is to solve the first three way better than anybody else. that if they got through the first three through some kind of like visual programming customization. Type of thing. that it was it's never gonna get to the quality level and the depth that we're able to offer by offering those as native features. It's interesting thinking back to that survey I shared.

21:39 Where Like then the tool people want to switch to if I T allowed them was linear. And on the one hand you could argue, well, okay, IT's not letting them use linear for all these reasons. On the other hand. you guys are growing really quickly within enterprise. Like you are not you're a new business.

21:56 You started, I think, mid market startups and now you're working right out. And so Uh, I think it's it's not fair to say it's not gonna work in enterprise. It's clearly working really well. I don't know if there's any stats you sh you can share anything about, but it seems to be going well. Expanding up market. Uh, yeah. I mean growth has been good. Growth in enterprise has been, you know, leading the other segments. Uh, because I think we've this year especially we reached that a tipping point where

22:19 You know, I I think with with software, so much of of the buying decision is is based on uh almost like a brand thing, or like is this for us? Right. It's like you know, a lot of times people pick You know, like quote enterprise software. It's like why why? You know everyone doesn't want this. And they're like, Yeah, but it's like it's for us. You won't get fired. For for buying Microsoft or whatever. Yeah, exactly. And I think that we're starting to

22:42 Have enough? brand penetration amongst enterprises where People can can have that feeling, right? That hey, like linear is four Us. Like who are we? Well we are

22:51 a large company that wants to act like a startup. Right. It's like who doesn't want that? Right. Who doesn't want to go fast? Yeah. I had uh Jeffrey Moore on the podcast and this is exactly what crossing the chasm looks like.

23:04 He talked about basically you need someone that's across the chasm, like a later adopter that isn't the person that's uh I love new stuff and I'm gonna an early adopter kind of evangelist. But you need someone that's like traditional old school take their time to start to adopt it for you to be like, Oh, okay, now maybe I should really take it seriously. I also think that with this kind of

23:23 This particular Category of tool. Uh and with a lot of other B to B software. Not Like no means not now.

23:30 Right. Not right now because it doesn't fit our budget. It doesn't fit our change management situation. Oh, we have this exec that's really wedded to this uh This you know, this other this other tool. But those things change, right? So we keep in contact with them. They're in our CRM. We're you know, we're we make sure we follow up and you know, we've had a lot of these where Uh you know we've been said no to and two years ago and now like we have some new features think like oh yeah it seems like seems like you're ready for uh you know for our scale or or whatever.

23:59 You mentioned that when you have these debates and questions that come out, you have features say a big company wants There's this category of we know we will not build things for middle managers that want reporting and custom stuff. Just to track what's happening.

24:11 versus Something that I see once. To be more productive and successful than you're. Give us a little sense of some of the more complicated debates. That aren't necessarily in that bucket.

24:22 I I think the the complicated debates are often, you know, when we do add a new native feature. Do we extend an existing feature and make it more powerful, or do we add a new sort of service? And a a big part of that Is

24:33 you know, kind of try to figure out exactly who's gonna use it, what are the actual like real life use cases that we know about. Yeah, like that. I know That

24:42 Bob from Company X. Has this workflow, and this is how it would work for him. Here are the different variations where it would work, right? So like tying it all the way back to like real people, like a specific person. Like a specific person. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Um not not a hypothetical person.

24:58 Right, not one that you made up, like you know, Alice Bob or whatever. It's like no, I like here's a first name, last name, here's their email, you can ask them. And I think that being able to tie it all the way back to uh to reality in that way. is um you know is a big part of how we really think about and discuss these things. This connects with the way I think about my newsletter is Uh I always try to answer the question a very specific like a person actually asked.

25:21 not a general sense of something people may be interested in. And that very specific question. Like it implies there's a need, like not implies it proves. There is at least one person who needs this thing. versus you have this idea of somebody that may want this thing.

25:36 Yeah. I think I think a trap that a lot of times PMs will fall into. is they will make something bec and they'll they'll make some choices in it because Yeah, maybe it's beautiful or it's elegant. But they don't go the the step of like Is reality also beautiful and elegant? Because reality is kind of ugly sometimes.

25:50 And if you have a beautiful solution that doesn't match with reality. It doesn't really matter, right? People can like look at it and they can they can ooh an eye, but if they don't use it to get their work done, it's never gonna have like long term staying power. Do you do you have a heuristic of how often you need to hear something? For you to could be dis convinced this is worth investing in.

26:08 You know, people may hear this. Oh one Bob Bob wants us featured. That doesn't make sense, just one guy. Uh, how do you know when it's like, Okay, we should really invest in this. Part of it is you you hear something and you're like Gosh that

26:20 Actually is no one's that true. It means that the way we thought about this was a little bit wrong. And like I call this process I don't know if it's the right way to describe it. I call it annealing. Right, where like you have a thing and it's it's not quite the right shape. And you put it out into the wild. So this happens like way in the um

26:35 in the uh sort of first, you know, kind of bit of the life of a particular feature, right? You release a thing and then you start getting feedback about it about hey, it doesn't quite fit reality. And uh and then you kind of ask yourself like Did I Did we test that aspect of it? Like did we actually match that part to reality? And if you didn't, then it's like that's the that's the part where you don't actually need that many. pieces of feedback. It's not really a volume thing. It's like, did we think about this?

26:58 Uh right or wrong. Th that's one sort of category. Another category is just you you you're getting um You know, you're getting a request for Maybe a very big feature. uh or a feature set from a lot of different people.

27:10 But then you dig in and you try to say like okay, well Tell me about how you're trying to use this and There's like a hundred different use cases. So there you have choices here, right? You can either build the big feature that covers all the long tail use cases. Or you can try to see if there's like really concentrated pools of

27:26 uh of use cases for this, um that really make a lot more of sense to kind of adopt as a as a sort of first order. uh type of feature. Um so I think those are the two sort of strategies that we um employ the most, right? It's like

27:39 Did we think about this wrong? And now we're just learning something about how it matches reality, or you know, for this big general feature that people are asking for, are there actually more specific uh kind of use cases that we should be solving and we should be solving really, really well. A thread that's coming through so far across a lot of these examples is getting to the

27:57 uh the person, the specific person using the thing. And making them happy and making sure the ask is gonna solve their actual problem. Yeah, in the case of looking at the I C versus the middle manager, in this case it's like Let's talk to the person actually.

28:12 Asking for this thing, not There's like a hundred people generally asking for this thing and let's build what we think is a general solution. Yeah. Like uh I'll I'll give you an example of of Yeah, all of these things, right? Which we just launched a feature called customer requests.

28:25 And basically what this does, right, it it brings it it adds a new concept to linear, which is like a customer. Right, for B to B companies this is very relevant. And the reason we uh We Did this.

28:37 Is because we kept getting this request for uh you know for like fulfized fields. Right. And and we would be like, Well, what what is it that you want with your custom fields? Because the problem is you add a hundred custom fields and all your IC start hating it. Right. So like we we don't want to go down that path, but like what is it actually you're trying to do? And like forty percent of them were because well I have a customer

29:00 you know, like you know, Walmart or whatever, right? Walmart asked for this feature and it's really important. I need everyone to know that Walmart needs this. I need to track in, I need to see like how how have we you know, report we can report on like what have we done for Walmart over the past year so that when my CSM has a has a one on one conversation with a rep, they can like have some kind of evidence that we've been doing stuff for them, like all this kind of stuff. Like, okay, cool.

29:20 Like That's That sounds like a very useful and powerful thing you want to do. Uh

29:27 How do you expect people to like tag these things? Well manually. That's how we did it in our spreadsheets. It's like okay. Instead of that. We're gonna hook up with your customer support tools. We're gonna hook up with your CRMs. We're gonna automatically bring in like feedback from these companies. We're gonna analyze the emails where they're coming from. And then we're just If if someone requests a feature that gets escalated into engineering, it'll just be tagged with web fast for it.

29:46 But you don't have to do anything. Right. You but you will know and you can still report on this stuff. But there's nothing about this that makes I see his lives harder. In fact, it makes them feel more confident because when they're building the thing, they actually understand like who's asking for it and exactly what the email said. So when they

30:00 they get all the when they're doing the design or the or the or the details. they can actually see the real life use cases that are present. And solve for those directly. As I'm hearing this, it's like, okay, obviously this like seems like an obvious solution, of course. Forty percent of people telling me they have customers Uh in reality, most of the time

30:18 If you hear from a bunch of your customers, hey, I need this custom field. And sometimes you hear one thing, sometimes you hear another. Most of the time you're gonna build this custom field. Something that Your head of sale shared with me is how impressed he is with the way you ask questions on customer calls.

30:34 And just keep digging and digging. Until you get to something that Is is an insight for you. And then you start to s try to solve the problem for them and think about what the product might be. And I think this is such

30:44 an important and underappreciated skill. For PMs. Is there any advice you could share of just like how you approach this, how you ask questions, how you think about these customer calls to get to, okay, now I see what we need to build versus let's just build what they're asking for? You know, it it's it's funny because I think from the outside, right? I'm I'm on these sales calls and then the the the AE or someone's like s watch me ask these questions. And I think often they're like, What are you doing?

31:07 Like you're you're you're just you're just like asking questions from angles that I I don't even know what your goal is here. And My goal is to feel bad in the same way that customers feel bad. Right. They come to us with a request, Hey, we want X.

31:21 And it's like there's something motivating it. And it's not You you can do the normal analytical thing and be like ask five wise and like try to figure out like what are your goals and you know, as a as a persona X, I want to achieve this outcome. You can do it that way. But You might miss

31:35 The reason that they actually feel bad for not having this this thing. Like I can't accomplish those goals, so what? So I'm not gonna get promoted at work. Like that okay, great. I understand the severity of your problem at this point. Right. Like like what is the actual sort of emotional valence.

31:52 That is motivating Whatever you're telling me. And it takes a little while to to get there. Right. Like you can ask people directly, like, how do you feel? And like they're not necessarily gonna tell you, but if you

32:02 have a long enough and deep enough conversation with him. You start to sort of level with them. And you're like starting to see stuff from their perspective. And the more you see it from their perspective, and the more they know that, the more they're willing to kind of like open up to you and like tell you, like, okay. Honestly, like You know, I I had this thing happen where

32:18 Uh I marked the The ship date of this project as December thirtieth. because it's a Q four project and I wanted to put it at the you know very end. And then

32:28 uh my marketing team lost their mind. Because they're like, We can't ship something at December thirtieth, everyone's on vacation, right? And you're like And then they're like, Yeah, this has made me feel really bad. So I don't ever want to put dates on things ever again. Right. So like okay, cool. We we can we can help you we can help you deal with that, right? Like if that's if that's what you're feeling. Then I can

32:45 You know, kind of start building stuff. to um to make sure that you never have to have that bad feeling again. People talk about empathy. Like you need to have empathy as a PM, you need to Build empathy, the best product leaders have empathy and this I think it's such a succinct and powerful way of

32:58 describing what empathy actually looks like as a product leader, which is I want to feel as bad as they feel. In hearing the story they tell. And it sounds like the way you do that is you get you Keep asking questions to understand what it Like the moment they felt bad about something, in this case the deadline.

33:16 Yeah, and it's you know, and if you if you ask somebody in that in that last story, like Like you know. what would you know, what kind of issue you have. You're like, oh like you know, marketing and I would just never align on anything. It's like that doesn't really tell you what's going on, right? They what it tells you is like you had this terrible moment of communication. Yeah, it's just it felt like Mr. Megan and you're you're like it's just gonna keep happening over and over again. And uh so you know the thing that we did specifically to solve this.

33:39 uh was we know on projects in linear you can just specify um Of target date. at whatever level of granularity you want. Right, you can say it's a December project, you can say it's a Q four project, you can say it's a second half of twenty twenty four project. Like whatever you're happy promising.

33:54 you can just put it on there. And that way you never feel you never feel like you have to like give this This uh sense of like false precision. So that you know, it ends up with a whole bunch of miscommunication down the line. I could see why people love linear is it just makes them feel less bad less often. Uh there's a lot of connection here. I know this idea of emotions and feeling bad is a core

34:14 part of how you think about building product, looking for moments people feel Bad Is there anything more you could share there to share how you think about this idea of emotional hooks emotional moments and how you decide what to build. So I to sort of set the

34:29 the background of this, right? I've worked in very, very competitive industries. I know I I worked at Everlane, which was like a direct to consumer clothing brand. Uh I worked at Mode, which is like BI tools, and there's like so many BI tools out there. And then obviously linear, like we're you know, we're project management. There's a lot of project management tools. And I I think the more competitive Your your industry is the the more the sort of like low hanging goal oriented stuff is is already picked.

34:54 Right,'cause every PM from every one of these companies has been asking, like, Well, like, you know, like what's what's your goal? Like what is your job to be done? And all this kind of stuff. And uh so you have to kind of look at things from uh an angle that other people might not have seen. And for for me. Right, and for us it's it's the the angle of of like where are the emotional hooks.

35:13 Uh that you know, that you're experiencing you know, as you go through your workday, as you use our product, as you use like competitors' products. And it I think It's probably under

35:23 Explored because Um I don't know. I I feel like PMs and engineers were like very thinky people. We don't really You know, we we like kind of avoid the touchy feely stuff. And uh so I I think that's the opportunity.

35:34 Right. You can sort of see Where are you feeling back through your day where you don't even know, right? You might think. I hate Mondays. Right. Like why why do you hate Mondays? Well on Mondays I have to go out and like gather a whole bunch of stuff that write this report that it's really annoying. Oh, so if I gave you a button that made the report, that helps like oh yeah, then I might not hate Mondays so much. And uh so like

35:51 Um I think Paul Paul Graham has a word for this. Um He calls it He calls it schlep blindness, right? Like I'm like schlepping through life and I'm just completely blind through it blind to it. And and it's true, right? You ha you kinda have to Have an outsider come in.

36:05 And sort of see you know, what the rhythm of your feelings are throughout the day, throughout the week and and like kind of note the spots where, you know, you could really use a lot of improvement. Is there an example? Uh you've shared a couple, but just where you've s notice this in someone using Maybe a competitor or even linear that

36:22 You saw that I know you gave the example of the dates. I guess is there anything else? A b a big Sort of uh a feature that people love about linear is um we have this Uh this thing called triage management.

36:34 And uh what it does is it sort of systemizes this thing where like if I put a issue into a A a different team. Right. If I'm asking them to do something or I'm reporting a bug to them. It sticks it in a special zone. Where

36:46 it'll notify the right people, they're on a rotation and and you know, like people will um You know? people will uh be able to kind of respond to it. And uh in a in a sort of organized, you know, s manner, right? And

36:59 I I think this you know, this kind of automation, this this feature. It came out of two different fields people were having. Like one, people were trying to implement the stuff by hand. And it was just a lot of touches. Right. And they were doing it, but they you know, they felt like oh I'm totally underwater. Why are you underwater? Why I have to like manage all these you know, throw all these tickets around and route them correctly and stuff like that.

37:17 Um, and they didn't sort of see this as like an opportunity to have a tool, you know, specialize in managing their triage queue. They just like they're because they were managing by hand and they were on top of it. Right, but it just felt really bad because they just had to spend so much attention doing this. And uh, and then there's the you know the folks who didn't do that, but the feeling was just like, well, it's totally out of control. People are just throwing tickets over the wall and I don't know what to do with them. I don't know where they are, they end up in all these holes. Right. And then the people on the other side are like, I throw tickets over the wall, I have no idea what happens to them.

37:43 Like I have no expectation that that people are ever gonna respond to him. So like there's all of these like bad feelings that people are having. They're all kind of the same root cause, which is like there wasn't a very automated, organized way to deal with your triage queue. Marketers, I know that you love TLDRs, so let me get right to the point. Wix Studio gives you everything you need to cater to any client at any scale, all in one place. Here's how your workflow could look. Scale content with dynamic pages and reusable assets effortlessly. Fast track projects with built-in marketing integrations like Meta, C API, Zapier, Google Ads, and more, A B test landing pages in days, not weeks, with intuitive design tools. Connect the tracking and analytics tools like Google Analytics and Semrush and capture key business events without the hassle of manual setup.

38:27 Manage all your clients' social media and communications from a unified dashboard, then create, schedule, and post content across all their channels. If you're working on content rich sites, Wix Studio's no code CMS lets you build and manage without touching the design. And when you're ready for more, Wix Studio grows with you. Add your own code, create custom integrations with Wix made APIs or leverage robust native business solutions. Drive real client growth with Wix Studio. Go to Wixstudio.com. I'm gonna try to summarise some of the secret of linear success so far.

39:00 So the first is get something out as quickly as possible, say in the first ten percent. of the time that you have to build this thing and get it out to internal users and then maybe a a growing list of data users and people that are aware of They're using early stuff.

39:14 Two is prioritize the I see in the user, basically versus the buyer. Or the middle manager that wants reporting and And all these custom features. So it's basically focus on the user.

39:26 Uh which I think you hear a lot, but I love this very specific example. Three is get very when you hear ask for features and requests, get to like the specific person using the thing. Not Just general, okay, cool, I've heard it a hundred times. Find the person that actually needs this thing and understand what's going on.

39:43 And then Four is look for bad feel feel feeling bad. In a moment, working in the product. Is there anything else that I'm missing that's important or any nuance you wanna add? You know, the the the the part way is to like focus on uh focus on user

39:57 I I think it's it's maybe a little bit more salt than that. There's there's a nuance, which is like find where the incentives are really misaligned amongst your user base. Right, there's a middle manager that wants You know, really detailed reporting. And there's a I see who just

40:11 really doesn't want to go through all those extra steps. And the incentives for what they want are just like very uh they're just very misaligned. And you have to find those Um situations and B Uh. Pretty judicious about.

40:25 How you make those trade offs. And where you can really find kind of like win win outcomes there. That's a really important nuance. Something else that's come through a couple of times as you've been talking is Also something Patrick Alson tweeted once that has stuck with me.

40:37 Which is This idea of having a mental model in your head of the user. So the way he described it and the way you've described it is Oftentimes people are like, Cool, we're gonna figure out what to build. We're gonna do a bunch of research talk to users. Metal informal we build.

40:51 And we built it. Versus What you've been saying and what he said is Uh you do a bunch of research, look at data, talk to people. That informs your mental model of what the customer needs in their life.

41:02 And then that informs what you build. And so that any time you do more research, talk to customers, it's informing your view. Of the person. And then you're like, Oh, this was different from what I imagine or Oh wow. This is exactly what we've been thinking and let's build that.

41:16 Anything along those lines? That you might want to share. Yeah, I mean I I can tell you a little bit about how we manage our backlog, which I think actually ties directly into this. We at any given moment we have probably like twenty or thirty.

41:30 Like opportunities that we could possibly explore. Right, just product opportunities, right? Like problems to solve. uh areas to you know, it's kinda to kind of improve for our users. But they're not

41:40 They're not like ready yet. Right. There like we don't have enough conviction around how we might approach it. So we kind of just accumulate understanding of this stuff and sort of periodically we accumulate some more stuff and then we like reevaluate, okay, what is our current understanding of how we might best approach this thing. And I I think that's something that people sort of struggle with is like they might have this model in their head, like a PM might have this model in their head. about how user behaves but it's just like very hard to share that with someone else you that you have to

42:06 You know, you have to like telepathically throw it into their brain, which is hard, right? So what we try to do is Kind of identifying. you know, areas that we might you know, attack with a product.

42:16 but also sort of keep an up to date analysis. of each of those areas so that everyone can kind of like engage with it and also contribute. Is there an example of something that's sitting at roadmap? I don't know if you can share these sort of things. That's just I sorry, sitting in the backlog of just like we're not quite ready to tackle this yet, but here's something we're Inkling hot. Yeah, sure. Um capacity planning is a is a thing that's been sitting in our in our back log.

42:35 And uh it's It's something we see managers struggle with all the time, right? Which is like I have a limited amount of you know, personnel and resources. And I need to deploy them in such a way where we can

42:48 You know. theoretically accomplish our roadmap, but also we don't get blocked by some bottleneck that we don't end up like blocking all of the projects because this one engineer is stuck on Uh some infoting. And you know, that that's a thing people struggle with all the time. All the solutions out there are Bad.

43:03 Right. Like the the best solution is a very, very custom uh spreadsheet that someone would make and it's A lot of upkeep. Uh so we have some ideas about how we might automate this, how we might use existing, you know, data within Linear to to really help out with this problem. And I don't think we've quite quite cracked it yet, right? I think there's some nuances that we have to really explore a little bit further. So we're kind of, you know, continuously developing this. And as we hear from as we hear from users that are struggling with this problem, we will like

43:27 you know, get on a call with them and and sit down with them and and and talk through it. And the idea there is keep informing this mental model, keep informing what this could be. Until you get to a place of like, Okay, cool, I think we figure it out. what will really solve this problem in an eleg in an elegant way. Yeah. And I I I I wanna really stress a uh like a nuance here, which is like

43:46 It's It's not that we wanna solve the entire problem, the entire problem's like quite big, right? But there there's something that's like really right for linear to do with that, like help people. you know, sort of have a have a good starting point. For them to sort of like reason about it. And uh and so I I think a lot of like building conviction around stuff is is not even

44:05 Like, do we have a workable solution? It's like how much of the problem should we actually take on? Because if we take on too much of the problem, then we'll like end up overpromising and not being able to deliver on it. I think what's also useful here is you'll keep your team very small intentionally and being constrained uh keeps you from taking on these things too early because Uh you don't have the engineers to build or designers. Yeah, that's uh that's true. I I actually hadn't really uh put that part together, but I think that's

44:28 You know, I think I think um some of the reason we we we've done it this way is because we we don't we we don't have the bandwidth action, everything. So we we kind of like you'll have this uh this backlog that we maintain to make sure that we when we do uh Take it on, we're we're we're pretty set up for success. Yeah. It's interesting. I think a lot of companies are starting to realize that that they can build better products and move faster with fewer teams. I'm gonna move in a different direction and talk a bit about how you actually think about building new products. Something that

44:53 uh I've heard from you is that you have a Uh systemized way of Being creative. Ha Which I think is a kind of a dream for a lot of people is like

45:01 How do I be more creative? How do I think of new innovative concepts? You have a really interesting process for how you do this. Mm-hmm. Can you talk about it? Yeah, totally. I

45:10 I I think you know when when people talk about like being creative. A lot of times Uh the What they have a problem with is extrapolating.

45:19 Right. They they they can kind of see the stuff that's right in front of them, but like what about two or three steps down the line? And then it's just like well, there's just so much possibility. I don't know which you know, what direction to go. So the way that we try to do it is we ask a question, which is like okay, how how extreme can you take it? Like you're you're designing a a a product, you're Trying to come up with a solution.

45:38 Like what's the most outrageous version of this along some, you know, some some trait? Um I I think like I don't know if you guys did it as Airbnb, but I think Brian Cheske talks about like Like what like what's the eleven star experience? Is that a thing you guys did? The it was a thing he talked about. There's always a yeah, there's always a push to what's like the ten X version of some idea.

45:56 When you when you think in that way, right, when you're saying like, hey, what's the you know, what's the eleven star experience? Uh what you're what you're really asking is like, Hey, what's like the most luxurious version of this this like hotel stay? Or like what's the most unforgettable, you know, kind of uh explain we can give people. And you you throw away things like I don't know, like uh Like cost. You throw away things like practicality, right? Because that's that that's not what's interesting. What's interesting is I I want to actually explore the possibility space.

46:22 And I think this is really important to do. Because The the goal is to get you to see beyond Like your your defaults.

46:29 Right. We have all of these constraints that we're operating under that we like kind of psychically have in the back of our heads that we we just like don't even realize we have them. So just a break past all of them. And and then you can really see what your options are. Because you know, we talk about like um we talk about like product decisions is like oh yeah, you have like these choices, like what what are you gonna decide? And those there's all this decision making. kind of a uh, you know I'm a theory, right?

46:52 But like the the biggest risk is you didn't see the right choice to begin with. Right. You have these three choices and like none of them were right. It's this fourth one that was like over in this corner, but you didn't look in that corner, so you never found it. And uh so I I think the the whole the goal of this is to try to, you know, expand

47:06 the the search space, right, of what of what you're trying to do. So what you're saying is People often uh Don't think

47:14 uh out out of the box enough by kind of not thinking too radically enough. And so the choices they're deciding between are just like Options. Yeah. And there's this process of

47:26 breaking out of that and Uh I think there's like I think you could hear this and be like, Yeah, sure. Like I could spend like ten minutes being like, Oh, what's the craziest yeah. But you're saying that actually is what you do and that actually works really well. Uh yeah. And you know, you do and you you actually build it, right? You you can think of a a a a very extreme version of a product thing. It's like, hey, like

47:46 Let's actually for the first version, you know, we talked about like The first version you know it's not really the right answer. Sometimes you know it's so hard because you know it like this is the most extreme. version of the answer. So let's build that.

47:57 As fast as we can. And see how it feels. And then we're gonna learn so much about like what the right actual answer is because we will have seen this area of the product space and really felt it. Awesome. Let's uh let's talk about an example of this, because this feels awesome. Uh yeah, I I can I can talk to an example. Actually, I is it okay if I I demo something? Absolutely. Let's do it. Yeah, let me show and tell. Here we go. We're gonna share a screen. All right. Um, so this is just like a like a demo space uh instead of linear. So the the the feature where we did this that I I remember very clearly because it was kind of recent, um is we built this uh this feature to save drafts for your issues.

48:31 Right. So when you're you know, as hard as an issue tracker, if I if I make a new issue Uh and let's say I I'm you know trying to report a bug or something, right? So it's like I make a bug report. Then uh You know, I might start thinking through like okay, what are the repro steps? And then I start typing them.

48:45 And this happens all the time, right? When you're at work, you're doing this, and then someone distracts you, someone pings you on Slack, or you have to go to a meeting or something like that. You're like, I gotta put this away for a second. I'll come back to it later. Like, you know, note the self, you know, figure out the actual repro steps and do it. So Like what can you do? Like Well you want to save it as a draft. So

49:00 Or like, okay, this is the this is the problem. And the first uh version of this, right? We're like, the most what what do we want to do? Like learners about being fast. So we don't want to get in your way. We want to Say like what is the fastest draft saving experience possible? Right. So if you save it as draft, you can save it as draft. If you decide to not you want to throw it away, you don't want it. Uh just hit the X button and it will we'll just throw it away.

49:19 Right. interrupt you with a pop up that says, like, do you want to save your changes or any of that kind of stuff. Right. We'll just absolutely get out of your way. Fast as possible. So we're like What's the risk here? Well, it might feel really unsafe, right? If we if you if you close this and we don't we don't like ask if you want to save change, you might feel like oh I just lost my changes on accident.

49:36 We knew that going in, right? We built this anyway. And uh yeah, it felt super unsafe, right? It turns out that you know that that that sort of inkling that we had was true, right? But we and we really felt exactly how How unsafe it was. Uh so then we were like, Okay, well what's the

49:50 What's the safest thing we could possibly do? But the safest thing is just to auto save everything. Right. So you start you start a new, you know, a a new uh issue and then you start typing some stuff, and it's just like auto saving as soon as you Type a single character. And uh that that did feel quite safe.

50:04 So Cool. Um but It also ended up like leaving behind like a whole bunch of You know

50:12 Yeah. uh like a paper trail. of things you change your mind about. Right. Like you've probably had this happen in like uh document tools where you have a whole bunch of things in your in your space called like untitled document or like new document and stuff like that. It's just like Yeah, so many unitable folders, right? It's'cause yeah,'cause the moment you like say new folder, it like starts saving it and then you don't actually need for that to happen.

50:32 So uh so you know, we well we we had those two sorts of variations that we built and we we fell through. And uh where we ended up was like a sort of balance between those two. Right. And so w what happens is if I uh if I'm creating a new issue like I am here.

50:46 Uh and I close it out, it'll it'll interrupt me. We're like, look, we have to interrupt you, otherwise it feels too unsafe. So I can save the drafts, right? I can go to my drafts. And then if I'm in this sort of draft I've already made. And I go in there and I you know and I start to say like okay, I'm gonna keep working on it, but then I get interrupted again. Then I'm just gonna auto save it for you. There's no there's no point. I'm not gonna ask you again. I'm always gonna ask you because I'm not gonna create a like a new object. I'm just making modifications in place.

51:11 So we made this sort of very specific choice of like on a brand new issue. We will interrupt you. And then on a existing draft that you're messing around with we're just gonna auto save everything.

51:22 And someone doing a uh a sort of analysis, right? If they did like a detailed tear down of the of these decisions, they might make they might say, like wow, they they made very specific choices here. But the path to get there is to do something totally extreme in one direction and then totally extreme in another direction, and then find where they they really meet up. Such a good example. The way that you described it is you went like here's the safest Route here's the

51:46 Fastest. version. Uh Where did you come up with these list of options and for folks that are trying to do this for their company, are these like Because these are linear principles, like we're gonna be very s fast.

51:57 Uh is this like the way you think most companies should operate these sorts of attributes. Do you think it's like specific to what makes their product different? How do you think about that? I I think for a lot of companies it's you you have to, you know, ask like what is the what is the promise That your They were product, they were businesses making people.

52:14 You know, it might be you always have a car. Available if you need it. And if you do that, then like maybe we're gonna have to implement surprising to make that happen, right? Like it's just it's always gonna be available. So here's here's the trade-off that we have to make. It's like a very extreme point of view to do that. Or you might say, like the price is always predictable, but sometimes you can't have a car in the first place. Like those are all sort of choices that you get to make and you you kind of have to sort of decide like where in that spectrum does it make sense. You know based on the promise of your company.

52:40 A lot of people talk about this idea of working backwards, Francesca Interbio is a big concept. Of working backwards from the ideal Let's design the best possible scenario and work backwards. Uh I love that this is even more tactical, which is Just pick the extreme version of very specific attributes.

52:57 probably not the sing not the ideal, but it'll give us insight into a version of the ideal and an element that works well and then what does it. Yeah. Exactly. I I did this a lot actually at Airbnb, just like testing the extreme.

53:10 Uh. So it super resonates this idea. And when when you say test, so was it like you build it And play with it. Do you roll it out to like some of these circles of users, or is it often just internal and then you like learn and then Iterate. Yeah, we we we rolled out some of these versions to to people. So the the the s the super fast version that was a little that was unsafe.

53:30 We that only went internal and w everyone felt it was too unsafe. But then then we thought okay, let's go to super safe version and then we roll that out and everyone started having a whole bunch of and we did the Like how how how many drafts are people making? Like this is too many. Like the people are leaking behind like this crazy paper trail. Okay, we gotta we gotta figure out some some some difference here. Awesome. So this very much connects to your first point of get something get things out really quick. And in this case it's like extreme versions, you're probably not gonna That are not gonna work long term, but it will teach you.

53:56 Yeah, exactly. Amazing. Okay. And seeing it in action, I'm like, Okay, obviously this is the solution. That's how the way this should feel. Yeah. Yeah. And to your point, it was not an obvious solution when you started thinking about it.

54:08 Yeah, I mean the best solutions are always obvious in hindsight, right? And it's just like you have to develop a a process internally that to eventually find your way there. Mm. Something else that you've mentioned when we were chatting that Connects to some of the things we've been talking about. Yeah, so you have this perspective that

54:23 B to B software. Isn't just Solving people's problems. It's also Teaching them how to work.

54:31 And it's kinda this like accumulation of information. Talk about that,'cause I thought that was really fascinating. You know, I I I think like if you think about how a lot of Bd B software gets Created. It's because

54:43 There was some person in the middle of some giant company who implemented some kind of process. And they're like, wow, this process is really working for us. Maybe we should make it easier. And they build a little tool internally and then like all of their, you know, colleagues can now like Press on buttons and Good things happen.

54:58 And then they turn that process in that tool, you know, they spin it off into a startup and they like make a start. This this process repeats thousands of times. So when you adopt that tool, you're not just adopting like the the actual software. You're adopting the idea that this is a practice that you ought to be doing in the first place.

55:15 So I you know like If you're if you're a marketing person, right, and you like you adopt some marketing software, you're not just say like okay now I can, you know, kind of write emails and send them to people. There's all sorts of process around that. Like you you're organizing stuff into campaigns.

55:28 You're measuring click through rates, you're like calculating, you know, uh cost of acquisition. And all that stuff probably comes equipped with a tool because those are the right practices to do when you're when you're doing this sort of uh marketing exercise. And you know, w whether you knew about it before Right, or you learned it from uh from the tool like

55:44 as a as a buyer. for uh for those kind of product, what I'm doing is I'm saying like hey, I'm gonna bring in This baseline level of marketing competency into my organization. Right, that like this is the worst we can do is whatever the tool defaults are.

55:57 Interesting. So it's You're basically buying into a way of working when you're adopting a piece of software. Not just I was Problem and he's solved. Yeah, exactly. And I I think that the most um

56:09 The most like salient example of this is that if you've ever seen Uh like a Like a company adopts like an ERP. Product.

56:17 It's the most painful thing you can imagine. Right. They have to they have to you know, it's doing deep surgery. They have to re redo all of their uh internal processes and the way they manage inventory and all this kind of stuff. But they're willing to do it because they know Yeah, this is a battle tested way of making sure that, you know, you you're actually doing good um like management of of uh of resources.

56:36 So they're like, we're growing up now. It's time for us to adopt these best practices. In order to do that, we have to adopt this tool and we will conform to whatever the tool is best us to do. This connects to a couple of things I know about linear. One is what you've shared of just avoiding these customizations. requests from people. Like you have a very opinionated way of here's why we here's how you should operate in order to build A great Functioning.

56:57 Product org and company in general. So I think Like I'm just connecting threads here. One is like we're gonna avoid letting people customize too much'cause it we know they'll Have a bad time. And then two is yeah, just this idea of

57:09 Uh We are opinionated about the way you should work in linear and it's like You have a linear method, I think it's called, of just like here's how a product team should operate. Based on everything we've seen be successful. Yeah, yeah. It it's it's definitely connected in a way. And

57:22 I I I think sometimes when when people will talk about um you mentioned like being opinionated. And I think sometimes when people talk about being opinionated, it can feel like they're almost saying, like, hey, this is like kind of arbitrary. Right, like y your opinion and my opinion, they're just two opinions, man. Like like you know, n neither is right or wrong. What we try to do is find where there's actual consensus. Right, amongst a lot of different uh high performing teams.

57:45 And then we can, you know, take those practices and say like okay, for a team That isn't you know, already practicing this. Can we give them a button? So that they can start practicing this.

57:55 Right, when when when a company we see companies like doing really good job of managing their triage queue And but it you know, it's like you know, it's very manual. Okay, can we automate this? And then for this other company that really needs it, that they they don't know this is what they need, can we just give them a button to activate this? And now they have the practice within their or two. So I think a takeaway here is when you choose a tool. uh recognize it's gonna change the way you operate and be thoughtful about this

58:18 The way we want to work. Versus just we just have a problem we want solved. Yeah, exactly. I wanna come back to something kind of a thread that's come up a couple of times in our chat is the way You collaborate.

58:28 Uh internally. It feels like there's a pretty unique way you you said you're on all the sales calls. Is there anything that you can share about how you collaborate internally, how the different functions collaborate that

58:39 maybe unlike how other companies operate, that might be helpful for them to learn from. Yeah, it's something that's worked really, really well for us. is uh we think of product management as as partially like a go to market discipline.

58:54 In the same way that sales and and marketing are. Right. Like when you when you talk to people and like hey, like tell me how product management works in your company, they'll probably say something about like well, there's engineering, product and design, they work in this triad, and here's you know, here's how they they interact and and collaborate. And we all kind of understand. why that's useful, why it's helpful. Uh but this sort of other

59:14 form of collaboration between product management uh sales and marketing. I think it's something that's like probably um Really under examined. And often

59:24 And often I I feel like in organizations you actually see kind of like some antagonism between product and and like sales and marketing. And I think that's kind of a shame. Right, because You know, when when we uh come kinda come together. The way we think about um

59:38 You know, the The way that we think about Selling. Is a matter of like Especially'cause we sell to

59:45 We still have the very sort of expert practitioners. And they have like a they have a very sensitive BS detector. Right. So like we like a big part of what we try to do is we try to help them pick Um, which I hope our marketing team like pick exactly like the right word and the right phrasing. To

1:00:00 make us sound like negative. to the language that our customers speak. My sense, right? Yeah, like engineers is a is a big one, but even product managers, right? Like product managers kind of know when, you know, like they they know what the job is like. So when you kinda come in, you say the wrong words, people kinda like give you a give you the stink I don't call them project managers. Yeah, exactly. Like for for example. So I I I think that's a that's a big part of uh what we have to do, right? So like we, you know, on the on our on our PM team, we actually have a full time product marketer, right? And her job is to like

1:00:30 You know, like Tactically it's like All the change logs come from her. all the release notes, right? And also like the you know, she's she's always crafting the language. for whatever upcoming release that we're uh we're building and you know working with directly with the teams and try to figure out how to talk about it.

1:00:44 And then once we, you know, go out and build the campaigns. um build assets and things like that. Like that's where that's where a lot of the language is coming from. It's coming from the work that she's doing. Uh and then you know, with sales, like they're validating all that message like in the field, right? They're they're saying the words to customers directly and telling you if it's like sticking or not. And then you can kind of like, you know, have a really good feedback cycle uh between those three disciplines. What I've seen you uh refer to this way of working as is a double triangle. Which is I think a compliment to like

1:01:11 The PM engineer designer, talk about that and give us a visual what that looks like. Yeah, I know, I I I think uh uh w PMs, right, like product managers, we w we often have a a tough time like trying to explain like what what is your job, right? Like, you know, oh it's like a little bit of everything. And I I think the you know, the job that I sort of uh do, right? That we see it as is uh you're taking the sort of building side of the organization and the the selling side of the organization and bring them together.

1:01:38 That's you know, you're you're taking all of the commercial Like motivations. and goals of the company and making sure that what you build it actually solves for those uh those goals. And you know, you're you're sort of tempering that with like what's, you know, possible and uh and sort of where the opportunities are to to actually build stuff.

1:01:54 So I like to me like it's it's the PM in the middle and then you have uh engineering product design and then sales marketing product management on the other side. PM was always in the middle. Indeed. Uh but I think that's true from the perspective of PM. Uh and I I love

1:02:09 I love this of visual of just like The PM is connecting the builders to the sellers. And you're involved in both worlds. This connects very directly to Brian Jusky's whole thing about how PMs are or should be doing marketing. And so the way they changed it or B or E PM is also PMM and there's no more

1:02:28 They're product marketers now. That's their title and th that's like the extreme version of what you're describing. Yeah, yeah, it is. And I think Apple's been doing it that way for forever, too. Got it. So the advice here is if you're a PM at a B to B business. uh lean into the sales and marketing side of it, lean into the go to market.

1:02:45 Yeah, and in fact, if if you're if you're leaving something on the table, right, in terms of like the kind of impact that you are having at your job, that's probably the thing that you're leaving on the table. You're probably already Doing a good job of you know, collaborating with engineering and uh and design, right? It's probably the sort of sell side that you're that you're uh Yeah, kind of.

1:03:02 there's an opportunity for you to to have more impact. Just to make it even more concrete for PMs that are like, Okay, I wanna do this, I wanna I wanna do what Linear's doing, I'm gonna get more salesy. What does it look like when someone is more uh is in this double triangle working more closely with sales? You talked about being on sales calls. What else there can you share of just like here, try these things. I I think originate the message that you

1:03:23 Uh that you sent to your audience. Right. Like There's a lot of things that marketing does, which you're never going to necessarily touch, right? There's always like demand gen and figuring out channel strategy and all this kind of stuff like. Sure. Right, that's a pure marketing concern.

1:03:35 But actually picking the words and what where the emphasis is. Like You should understand the customer at a pretty deep level.

1:03:44 probably deeper than any other uh like group at the company'cause you know,'cause of the the kinds of requirements, gathering discovery that you're doing. So you're gonna find you're gonna know the native language that your customers speak a lot better. And uh no, help your marketing team originate those words. Got it. So basically be really involved in the

1:04:00 in the m product marketing. The writing, the the emails, the headlines, the website. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I I know I know like the word product marketing is also so overloaded. They do so many different things and it but it's that it's that sort of like content, you know, kind of creation piece that's uh that you really have an opportunity to contribute to. Yeah, I love how concrete that is. It's like don't think about this concept product marketing. Just think about the words that your potential customers and customers see. Okay. Uh final area I want to spend a lot of time on is

1:04:28 Totally different. It's around getting a job. Oh yeah, okay. You have a pretty unique uh approach to Finding a gig.

1:04:35 Uh I heard from the founder of Mode about the very unique appro uh way you approached getting a job there. I imagine Linear is a similar boat. Uh What what advice can you share with folks that are looking for a job, maybe struggling? that work for you when you were looking for your next gig. Product management is

1:04:53 A kind of a unique role, right? Like because we do just about everything. There n you don't really get pigeonholed into you know, being sort of compared along a single dimension. Uh with everyone else. And everyone who's hiring PMs, just like when they're hiring execs.

1:05:08 They're they're they're kind of hoping that they bring them on to solve some burning problem that they they have. And uh so it's your job when you're in the ever in the interview process to figure out what that burning problem is. Right. So like put on your your your discovery hat. Right. And go figure out like what is the actual sort of like job to be done. Of

1:05:27 The hiring manager. when they're bringing on a new PM onto their team. And if you can do that. Right. And then make A good case.

1:05:35 that you are the person to solve that problem. Then hiring you becomes a sort of like binary choice. Between Do I

1:05:43 Higher the solution to my problem, or do I hire someone else? And and I think what what ends up happening a lot is when we're you know, when you're in uh uh interview process. You're just like trying to put your best foot forward, trying to say that you're you're great at everything. You have like very few weaknesses, maybe you try too hard, like whatever it is, right? And and then you but everyone's gonna say that.

1:06:02 You're just like one of the N people. And you wanna make yourself a little bit of like just you versus the field, right? Like you are the solution to a problem and then everyone else is uh You know, sort of like uh uh a roll the dice.

1:06:15 So the way you're describing it is Uh the company has a job to be done. Say it's drive growth of some feature. Uh In this case it's like for linear just building uh killer successful B to B. Product.

1:06:27 I don't know. That's that's a broad one. Like usually you're not Interviewing for head of product role, so that's maybe too broad. So it's like what is this? PM rolls job to be done at the company. And then help convince them you

1:06:38 Or the best person to solve. To do that job. And solve this problem for them. Yeah. And and a lot of times when you when you Take that approach.

1:06:46 It'll feel like You already work there. Right. And like the w the way that I I I did this, I I got advice from my friend. He said like I'm I was interviewing for this job at Mo that you that you uh referenced. I'm like, how should I approach it? He's like, just act like you already work there. What would you do?

1:06:59 And uh and then it's like okay, I I could do that. So then when when you're in this interview process and someone um you know, you know, someone's asking you a question, they go, Do you have any questions for me? Like you can ask them, like what are your OKRs this Clear. How can someone help you achieve those?

1:07:13 Right, you can like be that specific about like like oh yeah, uh sh sure, I can tell you about like the exact thing that I'm doing this quarter. And then n then you'll have some level of intelligence about like what's you know, what people are actually trying to solve. Uh, because I think often we just like get stuck like in these very high level general types of questions. So like, oh, what are what are you know what's the company goals? All that kind of stuff. And it's like, no, you can get really specific. Like if you were collaborating with that person, In your job. Like what would you say to them?

1:07:38 I love how actionable this advice is. There's obviously an element of like this takes work and time. Uh a lot of people are interviewing at a lot of companies trying to find a job. uh is part of your advice, like pick the ones you're most excited about and invest ex a lot of time in.

1:07:55 In this in this way of interviewing. You know, you you can invest a lot in the ones where you know that you're gonna be able to overdeliver on. Right. If you understand what they're actually trying to solve. Then you know where you're gonna have a both the highest chance of success of getting hired, but also like doing a really great job on the other end of it.

1:08:13 And you talk about how you're like pretend you have the job. You pretend you actually have this job as part of the interview process. Uh, oftentimes as an outsider, you don't have enough information to like have a really good thought on what the solution is and maybe part of it is gonna be so like wrong because you're like, I don't know, actually no, I don't have the data. Do you actually try to reach out to the engineers and designers on the team to try to understand things? How far do you go to try to solve these problems and show them what you can do? Yeah, I mean you know, you're in the interview loop, right? These are people that you're gonna be working closely with, so start start there.

1:08:42 Right. Do do your discovery questions. And uh if there's an area that you think you want to dig, you can ask. You know, there's there's there's no harm asking, hey, can you put me in touch with an engineering manager who's like working on the same problem? And um You know, if if no one else is asking, again, you're gonna have an extra piece of feedback from that manager and so yeah, like this guy asked like really good questions and it seems like they're they know they're really with it. Like they're no one else is gonna have that piece of feedback.

1:09:06 So during the during the debrief process. And just asking that question alone will show them how deeply we're thinking about this already. Yeah. Amazing.

1:09:16 N Is there Anything else that We have not covered that you want to touch on or share or you think might be helpful to listeners. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round.

1:09:28 Uh you know. I I I have a very specific uh point of view on deadlines. I don't know if that's a Let's do it. Fire away. Yeah. Yeah, I I I think like what often happens is people get depressed about deadlines, right? They're like, Hey, here's the here's the ship date and then then you never make it.

1:09:45 You know, and I don't know if you've you've had this feeling before, uh, as it you you were an engineer before too, right? So it's just like engineers is better, like, oh yeah, yeah, deadlines are just they're they're complete fabrications. Um and The only way to make Deadlines. Real.

1:10:01 is to take them so seriously that they are basically like a P zero problem. And like Everything else. has to not matter in comparison to the deadline because that that's the that's the only way you're gonna be able to signal to the team and also to all the stakeholders that you're actually taking it seriously. So you know, my my feeling on deadlines is

1:10:19 Don't have too many of them. Right. And when you do Uh it's a P Zero. So The engineers are working on it.

1:10:26 They don't get to work on anything else. Like someone's oh, I need them for this. Like, don't nope, you're not pulling them off of anything. We're doing this. Uh as a PM, your job is to just cut as much scope as possible. to make it possible to hit that deadline. Right. Like what are the things actually blocking us from doing it? Because what what you want to do. is at the moment where you have to make the go no go call.

1:10:45 On whether the ship You wanna be able to actually have a product that you can say yes to. Right. It doesn't it it might not have all the features you had wanted or whatever it is, and you can say no. Right, you can make that choice, but you want to set yourself up. uh to be in a position where you can actually say yes or no to something. Cause like what often happens is like, oh we want this thing.

1:11:04 Well, it's not even close to being done yet. So there's no possible way we can say yes. Right. I can't ship it. It's just it's it's like half broken. It's like no, you wanna get to a point where it works, right? It might not be the product that you want. But It is an actual real product that you can conceivably ship.

1:11:19 So you said that uh don't have too many deadlines, but when you do, make sure you everyone understands these are Actual deadlines. Uh, when do you decide it's worth having a deadline? Is it like a marketing launch sort of thing? What's worthy of a deadline in your experience? Yeah, it's it's it's usually having to do with some kind of external uh marketing type of exercise that you're you're trying to try to hit.

1:11:39 Got it. And uh and I I think that that's like the other thing that I I think as as builders We We we can often look at like launch dates and stuff like that. It's like, Oh, you know, who cares if it's a little bit

1:11:50 later or we skip this this change log or whatever it is. And I think that that's You know, I th that's that's really uh I don't know. It it makes me go crazy that in all in all honesty. Um, you know, I I with with marketing and communication to customers, you basically have a limited amount of Of opportunities to do so.

1:12:07 Right. A year is three hundred and sixty five days. There are twelve months. Right, each of those months has about four weeks. Like There's some rhythm where you get to have

1:12:16 Fifty ish weeks. to say something to your audience. You know, once a week. Or you get to have twelve months to say something really big or Four quarters to say something huge.

1:12:25 If you miss one of those opportunities, you don't get it back again. You can't like time travel back and say, like, okay, actually let's redo first quarter and like say this message that we wish we we could have gotten down to the Into the field. That is such a powerful point. Uh I could see the ex sales uh marketing, go to market element of your job coming out there.

1:12:43 Uh, I imagine everyone that's in that feels like, Yes, this is exactly right. Maybe just a last question along this line. So uh I love this idea of Taking deadlines very seriously when you commit to a deadline. Uh At the same time, as you pointed out, it creates a lot of stress knowing there's a deadline we have to hit.

1:12:59 So one lever you've mentioned is cutting scope. Another is just people spending the more time estimating to have more accurate deadlines. You invest in that. How do you think about just like For an engineering team to come into a deadline. How much to spend on like de risking and estimating versus just let's just do our best and then we'll cut. And adjust.

1:13:17 You know, this this this might be my hot take, but we do almost no estimating. In order to hit deadlines. What we what we do, right, is we Ship as early as we can. So if if you know, the thing we talked about earlier where like

1:13:29 If by the time that ten percent of the time has elapsed you have a working thing. you can now spend the rest of the time deciding whether or not you want to do another iteration or you want to polish that thing and get it to be a shippable state. Right. So you're you're you're kind of setting up your future self.

1:13:44 To be able to make that decision. So none of this is You know, you you you can't you can't go into this at the at the very last moment and say, like, okay, now we have to take the deadline seriously, right? You kinda have to do it from the beginning and commit to the process. Of Going very fast.

1:13:58 Iterating early. And then Putting yourself in a position where you can say yes or no to a product. So interesting and so different from the way most companies operate. Uh no, this was everything I was hoping it'd be. I think this is gonna help a lot of people build much better product.

1:14:12 Uh, which would be good for the world if more products are like linear. With that we reached our very exciting lightning round. Uh are you ready? Uh yeah, let's do it. Okay, let's do it. Okay, first question.

1:14:23 What are two or three books that you have recommended most to other people? I I think the one book that I recommend the most is uh The Design of Everyday Things. By Don Norman. I read it. originally in college for an H C I class I was taking.

1:14:39 And I think of of everything I've ever read, it's the thing that sort of caused me to see the world from the perspective of everything you interact with as a product. Right, every single You know, every pencil that you use, every door that you open is a is a product that somebody designed.

1:14:55 And is that is that the big takeaway from that book?'Cause it comes up a lot and I think and it's such an old book. And so I guess for someone that hasn't read or maybe doesn't have time to read it. is the big takeaway for you. Uh someone designed everything and there's a reason things aren't great and And They can be improved.

1:15:10 Yeah. I mean I I I I saw this the other day. I was at a cafe uh in my neighborhood. And uh I saw a kid rip a handle off a door. Like of the cafe. He like pulled it so hard it came right off. Because it was a push door, but it had a handle that looked like you could pull it. And it's that's that's like one of the canonical examples of the book, isn't it? Yeah.

1:15:28 Awesome. Uh, next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? Uh I've uh I watched The Diplomat on on Netflix, I think it it was. Um Terrific. You know, it's really fun. Easy easy watch. It has like some like West Wing vibes, if you were into that back in the day. Yeah, have you seen the second season?

1:15:46 Uh yeah, I finished the second season. Yeah, I wasn't as excited about the second season, just to put that out there. The first season was really good and then just kinda went off a little, like okay, I guess it's cool. But it got a little uh like spy thrillery, I think. Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. But still really good. And now Netflix. Okay, cool. Do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really like? I didn't discover it, but I discovered a a version of it that was really interesting. Um

1:16:10 There's a There's a pen uh Actually I have I have one on my desk. It's like it's called like the Sakura Micron. I don't know if you use these. It's like a felt hit pen. It's really great, right? Like you know, it was originally invented.

1:16:21 like in in Japan for like artists to like draw like like comic books and stuff. And uh you know, you can use it for anything. I use it for journaling or whatever. Uh but I I I was on Amazon, I was looking for I was trying trying to buy more and I found a package that said like Uh Bible study kit.

1:16:36 I was like, why why is wh why is this labeled Bible study kit? And it was it was literally just the pen in like in like four different colors. And it was because like the thing doesn't bleed through pages. So if you have like a Bible, which they often have these kind of like really flimsy kind of newsprint pages, it's not gonna bleed through. And uh and it's just really interesting to me that someone marketed like a normal package of these Peds as a Bible study kit and for people who like were looking for that keyboard. And it's like it was like official too. It was not some something hacked together. It was like actually like a an official packaging of this. Mm.

1:17:04 Amazing. What a unique pen choice. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto? that you often come back to and find useful in work or in life.

1:17:14 The the correct amount is too much minus one. And I think this this like kinda ties into like the try the extreme version of it. O of a thing. Where

1:17:25 I don't know, like a stupid example, like how much pizza do you want to eat? It's like, well, five slices was too many, I feel bad. Well then four was probably the right number. Right. And then if you want to find the right number, sometimes you just have to like really shoot for the edge and then find out what's too much, and then you'll find out exactly what the right amount is. I love how tactical that is. Uh makes me think about Elon Musk's thing about cutting. things like one of his formulas for just getting stuff done, one of them is just like

1:17:50 Cut stuff. before trying to optimize it and and uh and automate it and His advice is if you don't bring back ten percent of the things you cut, you're not cutting enough. Yeah. Exactly.

1:18:01 Final question. He worked at Everlane for a number of years and Uh You shared a the Rough idea of a story around a shirt.

1:18:11 maybe our best seller that they have now, uh, and how you helped create Uh a best selling women's shirt. Can you share that story? Uh yeah. So I mean to be to be clear. I I I I witnessed the creation. I don't I don't think I had a direct hand in it. But um Uh yeah, so it you know, I I

1:18:27 I saw this advertisement the other day uh on Instagram for for it's called a women's box cut tea. And it's it's a it's a T shirt that's like kinda wide and and short. Right, for women. And uh and I I looked and they had like twenty colors of it and I's like I re and it's it sells super well.

1:18:42 And I remember when we when we created this thing. And it was because there was a batch of um defective men's t shirts. They all came in like an inch and a half too short. And so like we couldn't sell them, right? You would have your your belly button sticking out. Like no one wants to wear that. And uh then so what we we did was like we have to salvage the inventory.

1:19:00 Because we're a very small company and we had to make cash flow and You know, we couldn't just it thro we couldn't just damage it out. So uh So, you know, the the design team and the marketing team kinda came together and they said, Okay, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna cut another two inches off of this and make it really cropped.

1:19:14 Right, and market it towards women as like a cropped boxy silhouette. And uh and we and we we did that, we're like, Okay, hopefully, you know, hopefully we can we can salvage this this inventory and not have to like take a write down. I it sold out in like a week. And uh we're like, Oh, okay, I guess we just made a hit product. And it's it's like one of these things where

1:19:31 Uh It's very hard to know. what this was, right? Was this like a marketing thing? Was this a design thing? I don't know. But we just you just kind of come together and you you you you find like the right product market fit in like the weirdest way. I love that it's still going. Yeah, it's still going. Like originally it was just white, now there's like twenty colors. Oh man. I love how many industries you have worked in.

1:19:50 fashion data analytics, project management. I don't know what's next. There's more, I imagine. Nah, this was incredible. Uh I really appreciate making time for this. Like I said, I think we're gonna have helped a lot of people build better products. Two final questions. Where can folks find you a line if they want to reach out and learn more? And how can listeners be useful to you?

1:20:08 Yeah, uh I'm I'm on uh X slash Twitter as the the non U. It's T H E and then my name. Um and uh you know If they have any. uh feedback about linear. Uh you know, we're we're very happy to take it. Um, especially, you know, for people who kind of like use it in their uh in their day to day. We really want to hear from uh from users. What's the best way for them to share that? Is it tweet at you? Is it go to the website? What do you recommend? Oh yeah, you can tweet at us. You can uh you can DM me on on Twitter, my DMs are open. So yeah, it's all it's all good.

1:20:36 Amazing. No, thank you so much for being here. Yeah, of course, thankfully. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

1:20:57 You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast.com. See you in the next episode.

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