Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear, explains to Lenny Rachitsky how the company avoids enterprise software bloat when faced with buyer feature requests.
Insight
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 …”
Insight
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, …”
Insight
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…”
Disclosure
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.”
Insight
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…”
Insight
Enterprise buyers can be convinced to drop software bloat requests
“What buyers care about is, is this going to 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 co…”