The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 46 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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, …”
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.”
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…”
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 …”
Operating without PMs requires interviewing engineers for product sense and judgment
“Probably the only thing I would say, it's like the hiring front that like you really need to spend more time on it. And like, basically you cannot really interview engineers only for the engineering skills. You also have to interview them for like the product …”
Linear assigns an engineer or designer as project lead instead of PMs
“So yes, like for every project, there's a project lead. That lead can be engineer or designer. It's not like a formal role or it's not based on it, like your whatever level or it's just like, you need to be certain title that you can be that it's more like a a…”
Linear operates with only one product manager across the entire company
“The other thing I would say that what we like to do is we actually don't have much BMS in the company. We only have one”
Linear does not use A/B testing or target metrics for product releases
“We don't do AP testing or we don't do specific or follow like certain metrics or something. We might sometimes, we do have telemetry or like, we can look at like how people use certain things. And we sometimes Do that. But like, that's not usually the goal we …”
Ramp product managers never write tickets or manage Linear tasks
“We never write a ticket. We don't spend much time in, in, you know, linear, which is our ticket management system. We basically, our contract is the vision and the priority and a very high level spec and everything else is kind of Pushed on the engineering tea…”
Vo: AI agents should assign project management tickets to humans
“The other tip that I would have is figure out a tasking system, not for you to the agent, but from the agent To you. So my task for the agent, they just keep this like to do file with a bunch of checked off items. It's very loose. But sometimes we run into the…”
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: 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…”
Software teams should set few deadlines but treat each as absolute P0
“The only way to make deadlines real 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 only way you're going to be able to signal to the …”
Product teams over-rely on data out of fear of making mistakes
“I think sometimes people use data a lot or too much because they, they're worrying or they're afraid that will I make the wrong choice? And like, I'm using data to like make the choice for me, but then like, you might still feel like this is not the right choi…”
Productivity and enterprise software should be opinionated rather than highly flexible
“I personally have, like, this belief that productivity software should be, and especially company software should be opinionated.”
Linear has been profitable for two years with net-negative lifetime burn
“We've been profitable the last two years and we also have this thing where we actually have this net negative lifetime burn rate which means that, like, we just have more Cash in the bank today than we have raised.”
Building features reveals product design requirements better than upfront polishing
“Whenever we build a new feature, one of the things is like, we don't want to spend tons of time upfront, just like designing it and polishing it perfectly. Cause we actually believe that when you start building the thing, you actually start realizing more, lik…”
Releasing early-stage software in cohorts prevents redundant bug feedback from users
“We thought that, like, if you just invite everyone at once, or a lot of people at once, all of those people are going to probably hit the same problems in this kind of software that's very early stage. So like, I don't know, they hit the same bug or the same p…”
Rachitsky: Linear Wins in Crowded Space Due to Product Delight
“I think about linear as we're talking, just like they are winning in, in a very crowded space because they invested in making it much more delightful.”
Simons: Prompt AI coding tools like writing Linear tickets for developers
“I would say talk to this thing like you do a linear ticket or a G or a ticket. That, that would be my advice is like in our order and talk to this, like you would like, you're talking to one of the developers on your team. Right. And what that means is be spec…”
Yu: Linear builds features by encoding consensus practices of top teams
“What we try to do is find where there's actual consensus, right? Amongst a lot of different high performing teams. 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…”
Linear embeds a full-time product marketer directly within its PM team
“On the, on our PM team, we actually have a full-time product marketer, right? And her job is to like, 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 always crafting the la…”
Management reporting features degrade individual contributor compliance and data quality
“The moment you start going down this path and you make you make the IC user experience worse, they're just going to disengage. 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 contr…”
Yu: Linear's enterprise growth is outpacing other customer segments
“Growth in enterprise has been, you know, leading the other segments.”
Nan Yu: Flexible project target dates prevent false precision and miscommunication
“The thing that we did specifically to solve this was we, you know, on projects in linear, you can just specify 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 …”
Competitive software markets have already exhausted standard 'jobs to be done' opportunities
“And I think the more competitive your industry is, the more the sort of like low hang goal oriented stuff is, is already picked, right? Because every PM from every one of these companies has been asking like, well, like, you know, like, what's, what's your goa…”
Nan Yu: The optimal amount of anything is 'too much minus one'
“The correct amount is too much minus one. And I think this like kind of ties into like the try the extreme version of it of a thing where 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 …”
Lenny Rachitsky: Linear is the top tool users want instead of Jira
“And one of the questions asked was, 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.”
Yu: Rapidly building extreme product versions reveals the right solution
“You actually build it, right? You can think of a very extreme version of a product. It's like, Hey, like 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…”
Linear grounds product debates in specific, contactable users rather than hypothetical personas
“Not, not a hypothetical person, right? Not one that you made up, like, you know, Alice, Bob or whatever. It's like, no, I like, here's the 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 re…”
High-quality design is a baseline requirement in crowded, mature software markets
“Whenever there's like a new paradigm, I don't know, it's like the mobile or the web or something, the first iterations of those products existing there, they don't have to be like super well designed necessarily because they are the first, but then like as you…”
Linear raised angel capital primarily to create psychological accountability for founders
“The main reason we did it was that we just felt like it's in the early days, it's good to have like You feel like a real company in a way that like you have someone to answer for in a way, even though the investors don't really run your company or they don't h…”
Design alone is never the sole reason a company succeeds
“Design is never going to be like the reason or like the reason why a company is successful. It's like the company still has to have some other things that like the product still needs to be something. It needs to be better in some ways, or it needs to be diffe…”
Nearly every private beta company converted to Linear's paid subscription plan
“And then a year later in June, we launched it publicly. And back then maybe we already had like, I don't know, several hundreds of companies using it. And then we also launched the pricing and I think like almost all of them, maybe one company didn't subscribe…”
Linear follows a guideline to never more than double its headcount annually
“In the, almost, like, the first year we didn't hire anyone. Then, like, the second year we hired, like, a couple people, and then the second year we hired more, a few more. We never more than doubled in a year, and that's kind of, like, been our, like, guideli…”
Startups ruin product announcements by copying the corporate tone of large companies
“I think sometimes startups do, Try to like emulate successful large companies too much. And you kind of like do this, like fancy announcements where it's like, Hey, now we're like doing this fancy thing. And then it's like, sounds very like corporate or someth…”
Linear requires all job candidates to complete a paid work trial
“So we do with all of the employees, we've done like a paid work trial and depends on the role, what it looks like, how long it is, and depends on also sometimes on the person, but basically like we do.”
Linear admits it still lacks product-market fit for Fortune 500 companies
“If a fortune 500 company came to us then, or even, like, today, we might not be, like, I don't think we can, like, provide them the solution today that works for them. So I don't think the fit is there.”
Hiring people whose skills exceed their titles makes management significantly easier
“When you have these people that are, A little bit more than their title. It's like the company is, I think much more easier to manage because it's like people can like pick up things more easily, or they can like work together more easily because everyone has …”
Most AI companies are currently using Linear for product management
“For us, it's often like there can be sometimes like, for example, now we have most of the AI companies are like, are using us.”
Linear keeps 20 to 30 unready product opportunities in backlog
“We, at any given moment, we have Probably like 20 or 30 like opportunities that we could possibly explore, right? Just product opportunities, right? Like problems to solve areas to, you know, to kind of improve for our users, but they're not like ready yet, ri…”
Linear tests every feature through tiered beta rings before full release
“We have a sort of gradually increasing sort of circle of users that use every single feature. So by the time it hits GA, by the time it gets released, it's been used by a lot of different users to that point, right? So the first circle is just internal users. …”
Linear used its early launch waitlist as a customer screener survey
“With linear, something smart they did is they had a wait list.
When they first launched and the waitlist was their questionnaire.
Would you, what do you, what the, what do you call it?
The screener.
So basically the waitlist was a screener survey.
It's like, w…”
Linear co-created its roadmap feature directly with Vercel
“We worked this way with Vercel that there was some changes they wanted to see in the roadmap feature. So we worked with them to like, improve it then, and then they could like, give us feedback along the way.”
Thousands of companies, including Block and Ramp, use Linear
“Today some of the top growth companies, like, Block, Vercel, Ramp, Retool, Mercury, and Substack are building with Linear. We also additionally have lots of other companies, like thousands of other companies using, using Linear.”
Miller: Trello Power-Ups are underutilized for solving complex workflow needs
“I think the biggest that people probably know about, but are often underutilized are power-ups, which is basically our integrations. And power-ups are folks that are usually doing things that are more complex often. But Trello, you know, when you think about i…”