Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus

Karri Saarinen is co-founder and CEO of Linear, an issue-tracking tool, and previously a founding designer at Coinbase and principal designer at Airbnb. The conversation covers how Linear builds product with a strong emphasis on craft, its opinionated and cycle-based approach, its lean team and hiring process, and how it grew from a private beta into a widely used product.

01Key learnings

• Ship features early to a small set of users or internal teammates and polish only at general release, rather than perfecting designs upfront.
• Co-create early features with one or a few large customers to clarify how complex workflows should actually work.
• Give project teams ownership of their features; craft often emerges when engineers and designers discover better interaction details themselves.
• Build opinionated defaults into productivity software so teams spend less time configuring the tool and more time doing real work.
• Make release decisions by personally using the feature and judging whether it feels right, rather than optimizing for a target metric.
• Grow a beta through small cohorts invited from a qualified survey-based wait list, fixing each cohort's feedback before inviting the next.
• Hire for breadth and product judgment, not just a narrow skill set; ask candidates to explain why decisions were made and whether they agreed.
• Ask whether a task is a main quest or a side quest for the company, and defer distractions that do not advance the core product and customers.

02Frameworks mentioned

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