Yu: Linear's enterprise growth is outpacing other customer segments
Nan Yu · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · Jan 30, 2025 · at 22:11
Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear, discusses Linear's expansion upmarket into large enterprise accounts.
0:00 / 0:03exact quote · 3.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Growth in enterprise has been, you know, leading the other segments.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Nan Yu
Product teams should build workable prototypes within 10% of their time budgets
“Speed, what it really looks like is, you know, you have some rough time budget for how long you think something's gonna take, and by the time 10% of it has passed, you have a workable solution, right? It's not like, oh, at the halfway point, we have something …”
Linear rejects middle-manager reporting features that worsen IC workflows
“It's customization features requested by middle managers in order to make reporting a little bit easier. At the cost of making IC workflows worse, right? Like, it's like, if it fits that description, we're just saying no. There's no debate because we've alread…”
Standard analytical PM frameworks miss the emotional pain driving customer requests
“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. And it's like, there's something motivating it. And it's not, you can do the normal analytical thing and be like, ask five Y's and like, …”
Product managers typically underperform by neglecting sales and marketing collaboration
“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 engineer…”
Linear does almost no project time estimation to hit engineering deadlines
“We do almost no estimating in order to hit deadlines. What we do, right, is we ship as early as we can.”
Nan Yu: High execution speed indicates craft mastery rather than sloppiness
“When they think about speed, 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 you look at if you look at people who are like at the pinnacle of their…”