Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Product teams should build workable prototypes within 10% of their time budgets

Nan Yu · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · Jan 30, 2025 · at 9:36

Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear, discusses practical execution pacing and early prototyping benchmarks with Lenny Rachitsky.

0:00 / 0:28exact quote · 28.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 that is maybe a candidate that we can play around with. It's like, no, no, no. Like, 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 panning out the way we expect it to?”

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

Disclosure
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…”
Nan Yu Jan 30, 2025 ▶ 17:05 Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product)
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, …”
Nan Yu Jan 30, 2025 ▶ 31:13 Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product)
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…”
Nan Yu Jan 30, 2025 ▶ 1:02:46 Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product)
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.”
Nan Yu Jan 30, 2025 ▶ 1:13:18 Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product)
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…”
Nan Yu Jan 30, 2025 ▶ 8:21 Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product)
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…”
Nan Yu Jan 30, 2025 ▶ 20:32 Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product)
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.