Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products

Nan Yu is Head of Product at Linear, the fast-growing B2B project management tool known for its speed and design. The conversation covers how Linear balances speed with quality, how it says no to feature bloat, how to uncover customer emotions and non-obvious solutions, and how the PM role bridges building and selling.

01Key learnings

• Speed and quality aren't a trade-off; true craftspeople move fast because they are competent, so aim to get a workable version out within roughly the first 10% of your time budget.
• Treat the first version as a best guess to test key assumptions, not a polished deliverable, and release it to internal users first, then progressively wider beta groups.
• Refuse feature requests that add customization for middle-manager reporting at the expense of individual contributors' workflows, since that bloat is what makes ICs hate the product.
• Tie every feature request back to a specific real person and their actual workflow rather than a hypothetical persona, to avoid building for a vague long tail.
• Dig past stated requests to the emotional pain behind them by asking how the customer felt, then design to eliminate that feeling.
• Systematize creativity by pushing a dimension to an extreme (the most outrageous or safest version), building both quickly, and finding the sweet spot where they meet.
• Recognize that adopting B2B software means adopting a way of working, so be deliberate about which practices you want your team to inherit from the tool.
• Treat product management as a go-to-market discipline: help shape the words customers hear, working closely with product marketing, sales, and engineering.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.