Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product)

I think you see on the team at Linear that a lot of people don't see, which is that there's not actually a trade-off between speed and quality. People talk about this as if there were a trade-off because when they think about...

speed, the thing they over index on is like rushing or being sloppy. What they should be indexing on is being really competent. If you look at people who are like at the pinnacle of their craft, you can basically tell how good the output is going to be of their work product.

by how fast they're going. What does speed look like when you say it can be done quickly and high quality? What it really looks like is, you know, you have some rough time budget for how long you think something's gonna take. By the time 10% of it has passed, after week one, you have something that works.

that tests some kind of key hypothesis internally. Imagine a criticism you all get. Over time, you will probably become a bloated piece of software as well. When we examine this problem, we kind of look at, well, what feature requests can we debate? And what kind of features... requests do we absolutely have to say no to the stuff that we absolutely have to say no to

is the exact kind of thing that leads to this bloatedness that makes ICs kind of hate their lives. Something that your head of sale shared with me is how impressed he is with the way you ask questions on customer calls and just keep digging and digging until you get to something. My goal is to feel bad. Today, my guest is Nan Yu. Nan is head of product at Linear, which is one of the most beloved.

most beautifully designed, and also the fastest growing B2B SaaS product out there today. You rarely see the kind of love that people have for Linear for any enterprise B2B SaaS product, and so there is a lot that we can learn from how Linear operates and how they build product.

In my conversation with Nan, he shares a system that he uses for being creative and coming up with non-obvious solutions to customer problems, why it's a red flag to him when PMs tell him there's a trade-off between speed and quality, how he talks to customers in order to figure out the emotion that they want to avoid and then figure out the solution to avoiding that emotion.

plus some killer advice on how to land a job, including how he landed his job at Linear and his previous role at Mode, and so much more. If you have a desire to build a company or a product that's as beloved as Linear, this episode will give you a time

of tactics and ways to change how you and your team operate. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you non-you. This episode is brought to you by Cinch, the customer communications cloud.

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Nan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm a longtime listener and reader, so it's really a treat to be here. I want to share something with you to kick off that I haven't shared with you yet, that I haven't shared with anyone. These results might have come out by the time this podcast comes up, but I'm running a survey right now that I'm calling What's in Your Stack, where all my subscribers are asked, what tools do you use most day-to-day?

What tools do you love most? What tools do you hate? 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. Wow. I mean, hopefully that means we're doing a good job. I think that's exactly what that means.

I'll read a couple quotes to give you a sense of what people are saying about linear. I doubt these are surprising to you, but this gives people a sense of why you're here and why I'm excited to extract as much wisdom as I can from you. So a couple quotes here. Linear is a joy to use as I interact with my engineering teams and I find inspiration in its design. Linear is simple to use, yet powerful.

Linear's design is obviously an industry benchmark, but moreover, the performance and speed is a massive productivity boost.

entire impetus behind why linear was started it's because you know kari was kind of like sitting at like coinbase and airbnb in these places and just you know watching everyone around him struggle using the tools that uh they had available and like all these kind of incumbent tools and just you know like seeing that it kind of made people like kind of hate their day-to-day a little bit and we all got into uh technology and design and engineering all this kind of stuff

uh because it was fun right all of us started off like building stupid myspace pages and all of this these like side projects when when we were young uh and it started off as this fun thing that we do and we're like wow we get to do this for a career and then to have all of

this kind of stuff put these big speed bumps into our day-to-day workflow. It just was really sad. So that's why we started Linear, to sort of really bust through all of that. What I love about Linear, I feel like it's an inspirational...

business because many people want to i'm going to build just a much better version of something and often that doesn't actually work out often nobody cares enough there's all these barriers and reasons people don't switch to something that's better and linear isn't

amazing example of building an excellent product and actually succeeding. And there's a lot more to it than maybe than just building an awesome product. So that's what I'm excited to dig into and understand how you all operate. And I guess just based on these results. To me, this is the ultimate sign of product market fit people like being sad, they can't use a product in B2B enterprise software, especially. So let's get into it. First question I want to get into is something that

I think you see in the team at LinearSeas that a lot of people don't see, which is that there's not actually a tradeoff between speed and quality. I think a lot of people think this is just an innate fact. And something I've heard you talk about is that's not actually true.

I actually saw Patrick Olson tweet this exact point that I'll read after you. I want to hear your thoughts. But talk about what you've learned about how there's maybe not actually this trade-off between speed and quality. People talk about... this as if there were a trade-off almost in kind of like a naive way because 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 an expert. So if you look at people who are at the pinnacle of their craft, it could be anything. It could be a chef or a programmer or someone building houses or something. You can basically tell how good the output is going to be of their work product by how fast they're going. They're going really fast and they're obviously not being sloppy and leaving a mess all over the place. It's like, yeah, well, they got there because this is just second nature to them.

And they're able to kind of go at a really rapid pace and try stuff. And when we're building software, that's such a big component of how good the product is on the other side of it, which is like how many iterations were you able to do? So the only way you're going to get...

a bunch of iterations done and try different things and really feel out these different variations is by just going very fast. In terms of speed, is the speed there moving quickly on each of those iterations? What does speed look like when you say it can be done quickly and...

High quality. What does speed look like? Speed, what it really looks like is, you know, you have some rough time budget for how long you think something's going to 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? Or did we have some crazy, incorrect assumption? And, you know, you don't want to wait till you're 80% done.

to be able to make that kind of judgment because then it's just too late then you're you're pushing deadlines out and you're uh you know you're making your marketing team very sad amazing okay so the way you think is we're gonna spend a month on this feature let's get something workable we can start testing with potential users even internally in the first few days essentially in the first week yes yeah yeah i guess how how can you do that because most teams can't do that most teams need to

research, design, build. Okay, cool. We have something and it's a month later. What allows you to do that? I mean, there's a lot of components of it. I think having really good talent really helps, right? Having engineers who... don't get blocked by every single little design choice. They're happy to just make something workable. Even if they don't feel comfortable with that particular solution, they'll just bust through it and make something happen there.

Part of it is intent. We don't have any expectation that the first version of it is going to be great. That is not in the cards. Look, the first version of it is our best guess. in the general direction of what we want to actually ship in the end. And sometimes it works out. Sometimes, wow, this first version was pretty good. Let's make some minor adjustments and we're good to go. But there's no expectation there.

So no one feels like they have to be a perfectionist and get everything all sanded down and really in tip-top shape, right? It just has to work and get the job done and kind of validate or invalidate our major assumptions.

I'll read this quote from Patrick Hallson. He tweeted this today as I was preparing for this interview, and he's the CEO and founder of Stripe, if you're not familiar. His tweet was, I increasingly believe that good, cheap, fast choose to maximize devious misinformation spread by the slow. In my experience, slow and expensive usually go together. Yeah, exactly. I mean, use the contractor kind of example. Like if someone's making modifications to your house and it's taking forever.

Like one, you're in a hotel and also the bills are adding up. The other example I used when we were chatting about this earlier is chess players. I'm thinking of Magnus Carlsen watching him. I think he was like number one in speed chess. in addition to just regular chess. And what a microcosm of this point. Yeah, I think that's the case. And like, you know, Magnez and Hikaru and all those guys who are at the top of their game, you know, they can...

They can go unbelievably fast. In fact, that's the usual, I mean, I don't want to get too out of my depth with chess, but the usual way you try to make the game fair, you give them much, much less time than someone who's not quite as strong of a player. And they'll still win a lot of time too.

So maybe just to close out this point and give someone something concrete they can do with this information, say they want to start moving faster while not cutting quality. What do you think they can do? What's one thing they can start trying to work on and improving in the way they operate? I think it's really that sort of attitude and point of view question, right? To sort of understand and take the sort of almost like controlled risk that the first version of this is not going to be perfect.

So it actually makes it a lot cheaper in many ways. It means you don't need a pixel perfect design. It means you don't need to make sure that all of the little UI bugs and stuff like that are solved because none of that really matters, right? What matters is you have working software.

that you can interact with and you can see if it feels good does it actually solve the core problem that uh is facing our users you can take it back to users you can even like let them into an early beta or something like that and get real um you know validation there

And, uh, and the sort of really focus on getting the, the smallest kind of just shippable element and like not, not shippable in the sense of like, I can actually put on the production, but in the sense of like, I can, you know, start learning from here. Just a question I imagine is in everyone's mind is what do you do with this first?

very ugly v1 not ugly not not fully ready uh first version is this something you're using internally to see if it's something is it something you have beta design partners with 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. We use linear every single day to write software and do our own work. So we have that kind of advantage. And then once we feel like it's good enough, we'll put it into some beta customer group. Again.

as early as we can in the process, right? We have to make sure that we don't end up corrupting people's data and it doesn't look hideous and that kind of stuff. But as long as it reaches that level of quality, we can release it to sort of early access customers who can give us good feedback and also just try to

solve their problems with it, right? If no one engages with it, if no one's using it, then, you know, that's a pretty good signal that we didn't really hit the mark. And then we have a couple of different beta audiences that we grow. And then the ultimate release obviously is for GA where everyone gets it. That's an amazing answer.

Okay, so secret number one to linear success, I'm going to take some notes here, is get new feature product ideas out to people as early as possible, say in the first 10% of the amount of time you've allotted. and then release it kind of increasingly to more and more people to get feedback. Like, I think an implication here is just most wasted time is on building things nobody actually ends up wanting or using. And so the sooner you at least get directional.

sense of are you heading in a good direction the faster it all goes yeah totally i imagine a criticism you all get uh people are like yes linear is so great so beautiful so much better than what's been out there for decades but

over time, you will probably become a bloated piece of software as well. That's just the fate of enterprise software. You have to check all these checkboxes. IT teams need all these features. And so there's always this like, oh yeah, sure, you guys can operate this way for now. You have an amazing product for now, but...

it'll get ugly and bloated. How do you think about avoiding that? I know it's something you spent a lot of time thinking about. Maybe give us a glimpse into some of the conversations you have internally when there's these feature requests like, oh, I need single sign-on with this thing and this button here. How do you think about...

what to add, what not to add, and how to add these features to not make it bloated. This question actually comes to us a lot from candidates that are interviewing with us. When you go like, hey, do you have any questions for us? This is the question that we're going to get.

We hear it quite a lot. And it's very sensible for them to ask it, right? Because they see, you know, sort of history being kind of like littered with the corpses of startups trying to compete in this space and not making it. And I think... When we examine this problem, we kind of look at, well, what kind of feature requests can we debate? And what kind of feature requests do we absolutely have to say no to?

and the the stuff that we absolutely have to say no to is uh also the the exact kind of thing that leads to this kind of like bloatedness that you know makes icies kind of hate their lives uh and it's it's very specific. 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, there's, there's no debate because we've already thought about it. And this is the, this is the thing that we can't, we can't take a single step down this path. So I think that's like, honestly, one of the core promises. of linear is that we will not make this particular trade-off right so when you when you see people saying like

wow, linear is so much faster, it's so much easier to use, it makes my work so much more enjoyable. This is the reason, because we have not taken a single step in this direction. It's very easy for a PM to say yes to this kind of request.

right because they're talking with often they're talking with buyers right and kind of like b2b uh type of space they're talking with whoever the gatekeeper is and sales is putting pressure on them uh and they're saying like hey we really want this this one feature it's gonna make our reporting like nicer so like

The director is going to be really excited by this and will definitely make a buying decision based off of this. And we have to kind of convince them that this is a false trade-off. The whole premise is wrong because 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 contribution. It's not based on like, did I fill in all the tickets, right? So I'm just not going to do that part.

or I'm going to do it very sporadically. And then, you know, I'm going to just focus on my actual job. And then all your reporting is wrong because all the data is wrong and it's like sparse. And you get situations where people will... you know, they'll say like, well, here's a dropdown field that someone put in here that's required. There's nine choices. I don't know what any of them mean. So I'm just going to pick one at random. I'm just only going to pick the first one.

Also, I'm going to pray that my boss is not actually using this data to do any kind of reporting that has consequence because the data can't possibly be correct. So I think for us, it's a very easy decision when it comes to that. particular category feature request. I love how simple and clear that is. Basically, you all have a policy. We will prioritize ICs over middle managers, especially I love that it's around reporting almost always. It sounds like I just want to track what's happening.

Yeah, exactly. I want to track what's happening. Well, what do you want to track? Well, I want to track which... which version of the product this thing's tied to based on some field information. It's like, okay, how is the person working on this supposed to even know that information?

well, it takes like a five-minute scavenger hunt every single time. It's like, I don't think they're going to do that, man. What I imagine happens, and I think why this is hard for most companies, is there's an implication that you're turning down deals. You're not...

Adding that one feature that will close a massive million dollar sale. Very difficult to do. I imagine it helps a lot that I imagine the CEO is very bought into this and there's this we will win long term holding the line on this. Is that right? So it is, but I also think that there's not as much pressure as you would expect, right, to do these kinds of things.

There are basic scaling things. We had to make SAML and SKIM and that kind of stuff. It's like, yeah, sure, we're going to do those sorts of keep the lights on type of work. But when it comes to work that's related to the actual... you know, the actual business logic of the apps like value proposition. What buyers care about is, is this going to make their team more effective?

That's the reason that they're making this buying decision in the first place is that they're like, well, the current situation we're in, especially with larger companies, the current situation we're in is kind of a mess. And if we can convince them that these types of things are actually the reason that it's a mess, then...

Like we can really kind of navigate them out of wanting them in the first place. Got it. So there's an element of you think you need this, but it turns out you'll be more successful and get everything you want not getting this. Yeah. And the thing is, it's not everything.

Because people come with a laundry list. And it's like, laundry list, here's 10 things I want. Do you want all of those 10 things equally? They're like, no, actually, I don't. The first three are the things that really matter to us. If we solve the first three, then the other stuff we can negotiate on. So our job is to solve the first three way better than anybody else. That if they got through the first three through some kind of like visual programming customization type of thing.

that it's never going to get to the quality level and the depth that we're able to offer by offering those as native features. It's interesting thinking back to that survey I shared where... like then the tool people want to switch to if it allowed them was linear and on the one hand you could argue well okay it is not letting them use linear for all these reasons on the other hand

you guys are growing really quickly within enterprise. You're a new business. You started, I think, mid-market startups, and now you're working right up. I think it's not fair to say it's not going to work in enterprise. It's clearly working really well. I don't know if there's any stats you can share or anything like that, but it seems to be going well, expanding a market. Yeah, I mean, growth has been good. Growth in enterprise has been...

you know, leading the other segments because I think we, this year especially, we reached a tipping point where, you know, I think with software, so much of the buying decision is based on almost like a brand thing or like, is this for us?

right it's like you know a lot of times people pick you know like quote enterprise software it's like why you know everyone doesn't want this and they're like yeah but it's like it's for us you won't get fired for buying microsoft or whatever yeah exactly and i think that we're starting to

have enough brand penetration amongst enterprises where people can, can have that feeling, right? That, Hey, like linear is for us. Like, who are we? Well, we are a large company that wants to act like a startup, right? It's like, who doesn't want that?

Right. Who doesn't want to go fast? Yeah. I had Jeffrey Moore on the podcast, and this is exactly what crossing the chasm looks like. He talked about basically you need someone that's across the chasm, like a later adopter that isn't the person that's.

I love new stuff and I'm going to an early adopter kind of evangelist. You need someone that's like traditional, old school, takes their time to start to adopt it for you to be like, oh, OK, now maybe I should really take it seriously. I also think that with this kind of this particular.

category of tool and with a lot of other b2b software not like no means not now right not right now because it doesn't fit our budget it doesn't fit our change management situation oh we have this exec that's really wedded to this this you know this other this other tool but those things change right so we keep in contact with them they're in our crm where you know we make sure we follow up and you know we've had a lot of these where uh you know

we've been said no to and two years ago and now like we have some new features like oh yeah it seems like it seems like you're ready for uh you know for our scale or whatever you mentioned that when you have these debates and questions that come at you have features say a big company wants

There's this category of we know we will not build things for middle managers that want reporting and custom stuff just to track what's happening versus something that I see wants to be more productive and successful than you.

Give us a little sense of some of the more complicated debates that aren't necessarily in that bucket. I think the complicated debates are often, you know, when we do add a new native feature, do we extend an existing feature and make it more powerful? Or do we add a new sort of service?

And a big part of that is, you know, kind of trying to figure out exactly who's going to use it. What are the actual like real life use cases that we know about? You know, like that. I know that Bob from company X. has this workflow and this is how it would work for him here are the different variations where it would work right so like tying it all the way back to like real people like a specific person like you have a specific person okay yeah yeah exactly um not not a hypothetical person

Not one that you made up, like Alice Bob or whatever. 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 reality in that way is a big part of how we really think about and discuss these things.

This connects with the way I think about my newsletter is I always try to answer the question a very specific, like a person actually asked, not a general sense of something people may be interested in. And that very specific question. like it implies there's a need, like not implies, it proves there's at least one person who needs this thing versus you have this idea of somebody that may want this thing. Yeah, I think a trap that a lot of times PMs will fall into.

is they will make something and they'll make some choices in it because maybe it's beautiful or it's elegant, but they don't go the step of like, is reality also beautiful and elegant? Because reality is kind of ugly sometimes. And if you...

have a beautiful solution that doesn't match with reality it doesn't really matter right people can like look at it and they can they can ooh and ah but if they don't use it to get their work done it's never gonna have like long-term staying power do you have a heuristic of how often you need to hear something for you to

could be convinced this is worth investing in. People may hear this, oh, one Bob wants this feature. That doesn't make sense, just one guy. How do you know when it's like, okay, we should really invest in this? Part of it is you hear something and you're like, gosh, that...

actually is, no one's that true. It means that the way we thought about this was a little bit wrong. And like, I call this process, I don't know if it's the right way to describe it. I call it a kneeling, right? Where like you have a thing and it's not quite the right shape and you put it out into the wild. So this happens like way in the,

in the sort of first, you know, kind of bit of the life of a particular feature, right? You release the thing and then you start getting feedback about it, about how it doesn't quite fit reality. And then you kind of ask yourself, like, did I...

did we test that aspect of it? Like, did we actually match that part to reality? And if you didn't, then it's like, that's the part where you don't actually need that many pieces of feedback against it, right? It's not really a volume thing. It's like, did we think about this right or wrong?

That's one sort of category. Another category is just you're getting, you know, you're getting requests for maybe a very big feature or feature set from a lot of different people. But then you dig in and you try to say like, okay, well.

tell me about how you're trying to use this. And there's like 100 different use cases. So you have choices here, right? You can either build the big feature that covers all the long tail use cases, or you can try to see if there's like really concentrated pools of...

of use cases for this that really make a lot of sense to kind of adopt as a sort of first order type of feature. So I think those are the two sort of strategies that we employ the most, right? It's like, did we think about this wrong? And now we're just learning something about how it matches reality or, you know, for this big general feature that people are asking for, are there actually more specific kind of use cases that we should be solving and we should be solving really, really well.

A thread that's coming through so far across a lot of these examples is getting to the person, the specific person using the thing and making them happy and making sure the ask is going to solve their actual problem. In the case of looking at the IC versus the middle manager, in this case, it's like, let's talk to the person actually asking for this thing. There's like 100 people generally asking for this thing. Let's build what we think is a general solution.

Like, I'll give you an example of all of these things, right? Which we just launched a feature called customer requests. And basically what this does, right? It brings, it adds a new concept to linear, which is like a customer. For B2B companies, this is very relevant. And the reason we did this is because we kept getting this request for fully customized fields.

And we would be like, well, what is it that you want with your custom fields? Because the problem is you add 100 custom fields and all your ICs start hitting it. So we don't want to go down that path, but what is it actually you're trying to do? And 40% of them were because, well...

I have a customer, you know, like, you know, Walmart or whatever, right? Walmart asked for this feature and it's really important. I need everyone to know that Walmart needs this. I need to track it and I need to see like how have we, you know, report, we can report on like what have we done for Walmart over the past.

year so that when my CSM has a has a one-on-one conversation with a rep they can like have some kind of evidence that we've been doing stuff for them like all this kind of stuff like okay cool like that's that sounds like a very useful and powerful thing you want to do how do you expect people to like tag these things? Well, manually, because that's how we did in our spreadsheets. It's like, okay, instead of that,

We're going to hook up with your customer support tools. We're going to hook up with your CRMs. We're going to automatically bring in feedback from these companies. We're going to analyze the emails, where they're coming from. And then if someone requests a feature that gets escalated into engineering, it'll just be tagged with whoever asked for it. But you don't have to do anything.

Right. But you will know and you can still report on this stuff. But there's nothing about this that makes IC's lives harder. In fact, it makes them feel more confident because when they're building the thing, they actually understand like who's asking for it and exactly what the email said. So when they.

they get all the, when they're doing the design or the, or the, or the details, they can actually see the real life use cases that are present and solve for those directly. As I'm hearing this, it's like, okay, obviously this like, it seems like an obvious solution. Of course, 40% of people telling me they have customers.

In reality, most of the time, if you hear from a bunch of your customers, hey, I need this custom field. And sometimes you hear one thing, sometimes you hear another. Most of the time, you're going to build this custom field. Something that...

Your head of sale shared with me is how impressed he is with the way you ask questions on customer calls and just keep digging and digging until you get to something that is an insight for you. And then you start to try to solve the problem for them and think about what the product might be.

And I think this is such an important and underappreciated skill for PMs. Is there any advice you could share of just like how you approach this, how you ask questions, how you think about these customer calls to get to, okay, now I see what we need to build versus let's just build what they're asking for.

You know, it's funny because I think from the outside, right, I'm on these sales calls and then the AE or someone's like watching me ask these questions. And I think often they're like, what are you doing? Like you're just like asking questions from angles that I don't even know what your goal is here. 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 whys and try to figure out what were your goals. And as a persona X, I want to achieve this outcome. You can do it that way. But you might miss... the reason that they actually feel bad for not having this thing. Like, I can't accomplish this goal, so what? So I'm not going to get promoted at work. Like, okay, great. I understand the severity of your problem at this point, right? Like, what is the actual...

sort of emotional valence that is motivating whatever you're telling me and it takes a little while to to get there right like you can ask people directly like how do you feel and like they're not necessarily going to tell you but if you

have a long enough and deep enough conversation with them you start to sort of level with them and you're like starting to see stuff from their perspective and the more you see it from their perspective and the more they know that the more they're willing to kind of like open up to you and like tell you like honestly like I had this thing happen where I marked the ship date of this project as December 30th because it's a Q4 project and I wanted to put it at the very end.

And then my marketing team lost their mind because they're like, we can't ship something on December 30th. Everyone's on vacation, right? And you're like, and then they're like, yeah, this made me feel really bad. So I don't ever want to put dates on things ever again.

right so like okay cool we can we can help you we can help you deal with that right like if that's if that's what you're feeling then I can you know kind of start building stuff to um to make sure that you never have to have that bad feeling again people talk about empathy like you need to have empathy as a PM you need to

build empathy, the best product leaders have empathy in this. I think it's such a succinct and powerful way of describing what empathy actually looks like as a product leader, which is I want to feel as bad as they feel in hearing the story they tell. And it sounds like the way you do that is you keep asking questions to understand the moment they felt bad about something, in this case, the deadline. Yeah, and if you ask somebody in that last story, like, you know...

what kind of issue do you have? You're like, oh, like, you know, marketing and I would just never align on anything. It's like, that doesn't really tell you what's going on, right? What it tells you is like, you had this terrible moment of communication that was just, it felt like miscommunication and you're like, it's just going to keep happening over and over again.

And so the thing that we did specifically to solve this was on projects in linear, you can just specify a target date at whatever level of granularity you want. You can say it's a December project. You can say it's a Q4 project. You can say it's a second half of 2024 project. Whatever you're happy promising, you can just put it on there. And that way you never feel like you have to give this sense of false precision.

So that, you know, it ends up with a whole bunch of miscommunication down the line. I could see why people love linear is it just makes them feel less bad less often. There's a lot of connection here. I know this idea of emotions and feeling bad is a core.

part of how you think about building product looking for moments people feel bad is there anything more you could share there to share how you think about this idea of emotional hooks emotional moments and how you decide what to build so i just sort of set the background of this, right? I've worked in very, very competitive industries.

I worked at Everlane, which was a direct-to-consumer clothing brand. I worked at Mode, which is BI tools, and there's so many BI tools out there. And then, obviously, at Linear, we're project management. There's a lot of project management tools. And I think the more competitive you're...

your industry is, the more the low-hang, goal-oriented stuff is already picked. Because every PM from every one of these companies has been asking, well, what's your goal? What is your job to be done? All this kind of stuff. And so you have to kind of look at things from an angle that other people might not have seen. And for me, right, and for us, it's the angle of like, where are the emotional hooks that...

you know, that you're experiencing, you know, as you go through your workday, as you use our product, as you use like competitors products. And I think it's probably under explored because

I don't know. I feel like PMs and engineers were like very thinky people. We don't really, you know, we like kind of avoid the touchy feely stuff. And so like, I think that's the opportunity, right? You can sort of see where are you feeling bad through a day where you don't even know, right? You might think I hate Mondays.

right like why do you why do you hate mondays well on mondays i have to go out and like gather a whole bunch of stuff to write this report that it's really annoying oh so if i give you a button that made the report that helps like yeah yeah then i might not hate mondays so much and uh so like uh i think paul graham has a word for this um

He calls it, he calls it schlep blindness, right? Like I'm like schlepping through life and I'm just completely blind to it. And it's true, right? You kind of have to have an outsider come in and sort of see. you know what the rhythm of your feelings are throughout the day throughout the week and kind of note the spots where you know you could really use a lot of improvement is there an example uh you've shared a couple but just where you've noticed this in someone using

maybe a competitor or even linear that you solve? I know you gave an example of the dates. I guess, is there anything else? A big sort of feature that people love about linear is we have this thing called triage management. And what it does is it systemizes this thing where if I put an issue into a different team, if I'm asking them to do something or I'm reporting a bug to them, it sticks it in a special zone where...

It'll notify the right people. They're on a rotation. And, you know, like people will, you know, people will be able to kind of respond to it and in a sort of organized manner. Right. And I think this. this kind of automation, this feature, it came out of two different fields people were having. One, people were trying to implement this stuff by hand, and it was just a lot of touches.

And they were doing it, but they felt like, oh, I'm totally underwater. Why are you underwater? Well, I have to manage all these, throw all these tickets around and route them correctly and stuff like that. And they didn't sort of see this as an opportunity to have a tool specialize in.

managing their triage queue. Because they were managing by hand, they were on top of it. But it just felt really bad because they just had to spend so much attention doing this. And then there's the folks who didn't do that.

the feeling was just like, well, it's totally out of control. People are just throwing tickets over the wall and I don't know what to do with them. I don't know where they are. They end up in all these holes, right? And then the people on the other side are like, I throw tickets over the wall. I have no idea what happens to them.

I have no expectation that people are ever going to respond to them. So there's all of these bad feelings that people are having that are all kind of the same root cause, which is there wasn't a very automated, organized way to deal with your triage queue. Marketers, I know that you love TLDRs, so let me get right to the point. Wix Studio gives you everything you need to cater to any client at any scale, all in one place. Here's how your workflow could look.

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of the time that you have to build this thing and get it out to internal users and then maybe a growing list of beta users and people that are aware of they're using early stuff. Two is prioritize the IC in the user basically versus the buyer. or the middle manager that wants reporting and all these custom features. So it's basically focused on the user, which I think you hear a lot, but I love this very specific example.

Three is get very, when you hear asks for features and requests, get to like the specific person using the thing, not just general. Okay, cool. I've heard it a hundred times. Find the person that actually needs this thing and understand what's going on. And then four is look for bad, people feeling bad in a moment working in the product. Is there anything else that I'm missing that's important or any nuance you want to add? You know, the part where you said like focus on user.

I think it's maybe a little bit more subtle than that. There's a nuance, which is like, find where the incentives are really misaligned amongst your user base, right? There's a middle manager that wants, you know, really detailed reporting. And there's an IC who just... really doesn't want to go through all those extra steps and the incentives for what they want are just like very uh they're just very misaligned and you have to find those situations and be uh pretty judicious about

how you make those trade-offs and where you can really find kind of like win-win outcomes there. That's a really important nuance. Something else that's come through a couple of times as you've been talking is also something Patrick Olson tweeted once that has stuck with me, which is...

this idea of having a mental model in your head of the user so the way he described it and the way you've described it is oftentimes people are like cool we're going to figure out what to build we're going to do a bunch of research talk to users that'll inform what we build and we build it versus

What you've been saying and what he said is you do a bunch of research, look at data, talk to people. That informs your mental model of what the customer needs in their life. And then that informs what you build.

And so that anytime you do more research, talk to customers, it's informing your view of the person. And then you're like, oh, this was different from what I imagined. Or, oh, wow, this is exactly what we've been thinking and let's build that. Anything along those lines that you might want to share.

Yeah, I mean, I can tell you a little bit about how we manage our backlog, which I think actually ties directly into this. At any given moment, we have probably like 20 or 30 opportunities that we could possibly explore. right just product opportunities right like problems to solve uh areas to you know to kind of improve for our users but they're not they're not like ready yet right they're like we don't have enough conviction around how we might approach it

So we kind of just accumulate understanding of this stuff. And sort of periodically, we accumulate some more stuff. And then we reevaluate, okay, what is our current understanding of how we might best approach this thing? And I think it's something that people struggle with. They might have this model in their head. A PM might have this model in their head about how user behaves. But it's just very hard to share that with someone else. You have to...

you know, you have to like telepathically throw it into their brain, which is hard, right? So what we try to do is kind of identify, you know, areas that we might, you know, attack with a product, but also sort of keep an up to date analysis.

of each of those areas so that everyone can kind of engage with it and also contribute. Is there an example of something that's sitting here, Roadmap? I don't know if you can share these sort of things. Sorry, he's sitting in the backlog of just like, we're not quite ready to tackle this yet, but here's something worth inkling on.

Yeah, sure. Capacity planning is a thing that's been sitting in our backlog. And it's something we see managers struggle with all the time, right? Which is like, I have a limited amount of, you know, personnel and resources. And I need to deploy them in such a way where we can, you know, theoretically accomplish our roadmap, but also we don't get blocked by some bottleneck that we don't end up like blocking all of the projects because this one engineer is stuck on some info thing.

And, you know, that's a thing people struggle with all the time. All the solutions out there are bad, right? Like the best solution is a very, very custom spreadsheet that someone would make. And it's a lot of upkeep.

So we have some ideas about how we might automate this, how we might use existing data within Linear to really help out with this problem. But I don't think we've quite cracked it yet. I think there's some nuances that we have to really explore a little bit further. So we're kind of continuously developing this. And as we hear from...

as we hear from users that are struggling with this problem, we will like, you know, get on a call with them and sit down with them and talk through it. And the idea there is keep informing this mental model, keep informing what this could be until you get to a place of like, okay, cool. I think we figured out. what will really solve this problem in an elegant in an elegant way yeah and i i i want to really stress a uh like a nuance here which is like it's

it's not that we want to solve the entire problem. The entire problem is like quite big, right? But there's something that's like really right for linear to do without like help people, you know, sort of have a good starting point for them to sort of like reason about it.

And so I think a lot of building conviction around stuff is not even like, do we have a workable solution? It's like, how much of the problem should we actually take on? Because if we take on too much of the problem, then we'll end up over-promising and not being able to deliver on it.

I think what's also useful here is you all keep your team very small intentionally and being constrained keeps you from taking on these things too early because you don't have the engineers to build their designers. Yeah, that's true. I actually hadn't really put that part together, but I think some of the reason we've done it this way is because we don't have the bandwidth, the action, everything. So we kind of have this backlog that we maintain to make sure that we...

When we do take it on, we're pretty set up for success. Yeah, it's interesting. I think a lot of companies are starting to realize that, that they can build better products and move faster with fewer teams. I want to move in a different direction and talk a bit about how you actually think about building new products.

uh i've heard from you is that you have a systemized way of being creative which i think is kind of a dream for a lot of people it's like how do i be more creative how do i think of new innovative concepts you have a really interesting process for how you do this Can you talk about it? Yeah, totally. I think when people talk about being creative, a lot of times what they have a problem with is extrapolating.

right they can kind of see the stuff that's right in front of them but like what about two or three steps down the line and then it's just like well there's just so much possibility i don't know which you know what direction to go So the way that we try to do it is we ask a question, which is like, okay, how extreme can you take it? Like you're designing a product, you're trying to come up with a solution. Like what's the most outrageous version of this along some trait?

I think, like, I don't know if you guys did this at Airbnb, but I think Brian Chesky talks about, like, what's the 11-star experience? Is that a thing you guys did? It was a thing he talked about. There's always a push of what's, like, the 10X version of some idea.

When you think in that way, right? When you're saying like, hey, what's the, you know, what's the 11 star experience? What you're really asking is like, hey, what's like the most luxurious version of this like hotel stay? Or like, what's the most unforgettable?

kind of experience we can give people. And you throw away things like, I don't know, like cost. You throw away things like practicality, right? Because that's not what's interesting. What's interesting is I want to actually explore the possibility space. And I think this is really important to do because the goal is to get you to see beyond.

your your defaults right we have all these constraints that we're operating under that we like kind of psychically have in the back of our heads that we just like don't even realize we have them so just to break past all of them and and then you can really see what your options are

Because we talk about product decisions. It's like, oh, yeah, you have these choices. What are you going to decide? There's all this decision-making kind of theory, right? But the biggest risk is you didn't see the right choice to begin with.

You have these three choices and none of them were right. It's this fourth one that was over in this corner, but you didn't look in that corner, so you never found it. And so I think the whole goal of this is to try to expand the search space of what you're trying to do. So what you're saying is... People often don't think out of the box enough by kind of not thinking too radically enough. And so the choices they're deciding between are just like meh options.

And there's this process of breaking out of that. And I think there's like I think you could hear this and be like, yeah, sure. Like I could spend like 10 minutes being like, oh, what's the craziest? Yeah. But you're saying that actually is what you do and that actually works really well. Yeah. And, you know, you do and 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's so hard because you know this is the most extreme version of the answer. So let's build that as fast as we can. and see how it feels. And then we're going to learn so much about what the right actual answer is because we will have seen this area of the product space and really felt it.

Awesome. Let's talk about an example of this because this feels awesome. Yeah, I can talk to an example. Actually, is it okay if I demo something? Absolutely. Let's do it. Let me show and tell. Let me do that right now. Here we go. We're going to share a screen. All right. So this is just like a demo space instead of linear. So the feature where we did this that I remember very clearly because it was kind of recent is we built this feature to save drafts for your issues.

Right. So linear, you know, as hard as an issue tracker, if I if I make a new issue, and let's say I'm trying to report a bug or something, right, so it's like I make a bug report, then, you know, I might start thinking through like, okay, what are the repro steps, and then I start typing them.

And this happens all the time, right? When you're at work, you're doing this and someone distracts you. Someone pings you on Slack or you have to go to a meeting or something like that. You're like, I got to put this away for a second. I'll come back to it later. Like, you know, note to self, you know, figure out the actual repro steps and do it.

Like, what can you do? Like, well, you want to save it as a draft. So we're like, okay, this is the, this is the problem. And the first version of this, right? We're like, the most, what do we want to do? Like linear is about being fast. So we don't want to get in your way. We want to say like, what is the fastest draft saving experience possible?

right so if you save it as draft you can save this draft if you decide to not you want to throw it away you don't want it uh just hit the x button it will just throw it away right we're not going to like interrupt you with a pop-up that says like do you want to save your changes or any of that kind of stuff right we'll just absolutely get out of your way

fast as possible. So we're like, what's the risk here? Well, it might feel really unsafe, right? If you close this and we don't ask if you want to save changes, you might feel like, oh, I just lost my changes on accident. We knew that going in, right? We built this anyway. And yeah, it felt super unsafe, right? It turns out...

that sort of inkling that we had was true, right? And we really felt exactly how unsafe it was. So then we were like, okay, well, what's the safest thing we could possibly do? The safest thing is just auto-save everything. So you start a new issue and then you start typing some stuff. And it's just like autosaving as soon as you type a single character. And that did feel quite safe. So, cool. But...

It also ended up leaving behind a whole bunch of, you know, like a paper trail of things you change your mind about, right? You've probably had this happen in like a document. tools where you have a whole bunch of things in your space called untitled document or new document or stuff like that. So many untitled folders. Yeah, so many untitled folders, right? Because the moment you say new folder, it starts saving it and then you don't actually need for that to happen.

So, you know, we had those two sorts of variations that we built and we fell through. And where we ended up was like a sort of balance between those two, right? And so what happens is if I'm creating a new issue like I am here... and I close it out, it'll interrupt me. We're like, we have to interrupt you, otherwise it feels too unsafe. So I can save the draft, right? I can go to my drafts. And then if I'm in this sort of draft I've already made,

and I go in there and I start to say, okay, I'm going to keep working on it, but then I get interrupted again, then I'm just going to autosave it for you. There's no point. I'm not going to ask you again. I'm always going to autosave because I'm not going to create a new object. I'm just making modifications in place.

So we made this sort of very specific choice of like on a brand new issue, we will interrupt you. And then on an existing draft that you're messing around with, we're just going to autosave everything. And someone doing a sort of analysis, right? If they did like a detailed teardown of these decisions, they might say like, wow, they made very specific choices here.

But the path to get there is to do something totally extreme in one direction and then totally extreme in another direction and then find where they really meet. Such a good example. The way that you described it is you went like, here's the safest route. Here's the... fastest version uh where did you come up with these list of options and for folks that are trying to do this for their company are these like because these are linear principles like we're going to be very fast uh is this like

the way you think most companies should operate these sorts of attributes? Do you think it's specific to what makes their product different? How do you think about that? I think for a lot of companies, you have to ask, what is the promise that your product or your business is making people?

It might be you always have a car available if you need it. And if you do that, then maybe we're going to have to implement search pricing to make that happen. It's always going to be available. So here's the trade-off that we have to make. It's a very extreme point of view to do that.

Or you might say like the price is always predictable, but sometimes you can't have a car in the first place. Like those are all sort of choices that you get to make. And you kind of have to sort of decide like where on that spectrum does it make sense, you know, based on the promise of your company.

A lot of people talk about this idea of working backwards. Francesc, interviewing me was a big concept of working backwards from the ideal. Let's design the best possible scenario and work backwards. I love that this is even more tactical, which is... Just pick the extreme version of very specific attributes. Probably not the ideal, but it'll give us insight into a version of the ideal and an element that works well and then what doesn't. Yeah, exactly.

I did this a lot, actually, at Airbnb, just like testing the extreme. So it super resonates this idea. And when you say test, so was it like you build it? and play with it you roll it out to like some of these circles of users or is it often just internal and then you like learn and then iterate yeah we we rolled out some of these versions to people so the the the super fast version that was a little that was unsafe

That only went internal, and everyone felt it was too unsafe. But then we thought, okay, let's go to the super safe version, and then we rolled that out, and everyone started having a whole bunch of...

like how many drafts are people making like this is too many like the people are leaving behind like this crazy paper trail okay we gotta we gotta figure out some some some difference here awesome so this very much connects to your first point of get something get things out really quick and in this case it's like extreme versions you're probably not gonna

that are not going to work long-term, but it will teach you. Yeah, exactly. Amazing. Okay. And seeing it in action, I'm like, okay, obviously this is the solution. That's how the way this should feel. Yeah. And to your point, it was not an obvious solution when you started thinking about it.

Yeah, I mean, the best solutions are always obvious in hindsight, right? And it's just like you have to develop a process internally that to eventually find your way there. Something else that you've mentioned when we were chatting that connects to some of the things we've been talking about.

is you have this perspective that B2B software isn't just solving people's problems. It's also teaching them how to work. And it's kind of this accumulation of information. Can you talk about that? Because I thought that was really fascinating. I think if you think about how a lot of B2B software gets created, it's because there was some person in the middle of some giant company who implemented some kind of process.

And they're like, wow, this process is really working for us. Maybe we should make it easier. And they build a little tool internally and then all of their colleagues can now press on buttons and good things happen. And then they turn that... process in that tool, you know, they spin it off into a startup and they like make a startup. This process repeats thousands of times. So when you adopt that tool, you're not just adopting like the actual software, you're adopting the...

idea that this is a practice that you ought to be doing in the first place so i you know like if you're if you're a marketing person right and you like you adopt some marketing software you're not just saying like okay now i can you know kind of write emails and send to people there's all sorts of

process around that. You're organizing stuff into campaigns, you're measuring click-through rates, you're calculating cost of acquisition, and all that stuff probably comes equipped with a tool because those are the right practices to do when you're doing this sort of marketing exercise. And, you know, whether you knew about it before, right, or you learned it from the tool, like as a buyer for this kind of product, what I'm doing is I'm saying like, hey, I'm going to bring in this.

baseline level of marketing competency into my organization, right? That like, this is the worst we can do is whatever the tool defaults are. Interesting. So it's, you're basically buying into a way of working when you're adopting a piece of software, not just have this. problem and he's solved yeah exactly and i think that the most um the most like salient example of this is if you've ever seen uh like a like a company adopt like an erp product

it's the most painful thing you can imagine, right? They have to, you know, it's doing deep surgery. They have to redo all of their internal processes and the way they've managed inventory and all this kind of stuff. But they're willing to do it because they know.

that this is a battle-tested way of making sure that you're actually doing good management of resources. So they're like, we're growing up now. It's time for us to adopt these best practices. In order to do that, we have to adopt this tool, and we will conform to whatever the tool expects us to do.

This connects a couple of things I know about Linear. One is what you've shared of just avoiding these customizations requests from people. Like you have a very opinionated way of here's how you should operate in order to build a great functioning product org and company in general.

So I think like I'm just connecting threads here. One is like we're going to avoid letting people customize too much because we know they will have a bad time. And then two is just this idea of we are opinionated about the way you should work in linear. And it's like.

You have a linear method, I think it's called, of just like, here's how a product team should operate based on everything we've seen be successful. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely connected in a way. And I think sometimes when people talk about, you mentioned like being opinionated.

And I think sometimes when people talk about being opinionated, it can feel like they're almost saying like, hey, this is kind of arbitrary. Your opinion and my opinion, they're just two opinions, man. Neither is right or wrong. What we try to do is find where there's actual consensus.

amongst a lot of different high-performing teams. And then we can take those practices and say, okay, for a team that isn't already practicing this, can we give them a button so that they can start practicing this? When we see companies doing a really good job of managing their triage queue, but it's very manual, we're like, okay, can we automate this?

And then for this other company that really needs it, that they don't know this is what they need, can we just give them a button to activate this? And now they have to practice within their OR2. So I think a takeaway here is when you choose a tool, recognize it's going to change the way you operate and be thoughtful about business.

the way we want to work versus just we just have a problem we want solved. Yeah, exactly. I want to come back to something kind of a thread that's come up a couple times in our chat is the way you collaborate internally.

It feels like there's a pretty unique way. You said you're on all the sales calls. Is there anything that you can share about how you collaborate internally, how the different functions collaborate that may be unlike how other companies operate that might be helpful for them to learn from? Yeah, something that's worked really, really well for us is we think of product management as partially like a go-to-market discipline in the same way that sales and marketing are.

When you talk to people and like, hey, tell me how product management works in your company, they'll probably say something about like, well, there's engineering, product and design. They work in this triad. And here's how they interact and collaborate. And we all kind of understand. why that's useful why it's helpful uh but this sort of other form of collaboration between product management uh sales and marketing i think it's something that's like probably um really under examined and often

You know, often I feel like in organizations, you actually see kind of like some antagonism between product and like sales and marketing. And I think that's kind of a shame, right? Because, you know, when we kind of come together, the way we think about... you know, the way that we think about selling is a matter of like, especially because we sell to, we sell the very sort of expert practitioners and they have like a, they have a very sensitive BS detector.

right so like we like a big part of what we try to do is we try to help them pick um we try to help our marketing team like pick exactly like the right word and the right phrasing to make us sound like native to the language that our customers speak

You're talking about engineers is my sense, right? Yeah, like engineers is a big one, but even product managers, right? Like product managers kind of know when, you know, like they know what the job is like. So when you kind of come in, you say the wrong words, people kind of like give you a, give you this thing. Don't call them project.

managers yeah exactly like for for example so i i think that's a that's a big part of uh you know what we have to do right so like we you know on the on our 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 language for whatever upcoming release that we're building and, you know, working directly with the teams and trying to figure out how to talk about it. And then once we go out and build the campaigns, build assets and things like that, that's where a lot of the language is coming from. It's coming from the work that she's doing.

And then with sales, they're validating all that message in the field. They're saying the words to customers directly and telling you if it's sticking or not. And then you can have a really good feedback cycle between those three disciplines. What I've seen you refer to this way of working as is a double triangle, which is, I think, a compliment to like the PM engineer designer. Talk about that and give us a visual of what that looks like.

Yeah, I think PMs, product managers, we often have a tough time trying to explain what is your job. It's like a little bit of everything. And I think the job that... i sort of uh do right that we see it as is uh you're taking the sort of building side of the organization and the the selling side of the organization and bring them together that's you know you're taking all the commercial like motivations

and goals of the company and making sure that what you build actually solves for those goals. And you're sort of tempering that with what's possible and sort of where the opportunities are to actually build stuff. So to me, it's the PM in the middle and then you have engineering product design and then sales marketing product management on the other side. PM is always in the middle. Indeed. But I think that's true from the perspective of PM. And I love...

I love this visual of just like the PM is connecting the builders to the sellers and you're involved in both worlds. This connects very directly to Brian Jeske's whole thing about how PMs are... or should be doing marketing. And so the way they changed it at Airbnb, every PM is also PMM and there's no more. They're product marketers now. That's their title. And that's like the extreme version of what you're describing. Yeah, yeah, it is. And I think Apple has been doing that way for forever too.

Got it. So the advice here is if you're a PM at a B2B business, lean into the sales and marketing side of it. Lean into the go-to-market. Yeah. And in fact, 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 engineering and...

and design, right? It's probably the sort of sell side that there's an opportunity for you to have more impact. Just to make it even more concrete for PMs that are like, okay, I want to do this. I want to do what Linear's doing. I'm going to get more salesy.

What does it look like when someone is in this double triangle working more closely with sales? You talked about being on sales calls. What else there can you share of just like, here, try these things? I think originate the message that you send to your audience, right?

There's a lot of things that marketing does which you're never going to necessarily touch. There's always demand gen and figuring out channel strategy and all this kind of stuff. Sure. That's a pure marketing concern. But actually picking the words and where the emphasis is...

Like you should understand the customer at a pretty deep level, probably deeper than any other like group at the company. Cause you know, cause of the kinds of requirements gathering discovery that you're doing. So you're going to find, you're going to know the native language that your customer speaks a lot better. and help your marketing team originate those words. Got it. So basically be really involved in the product marketing, the writing, the emails, the headlines, the website.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I know like the word product marketing is also so overloaded. They do so many different things. But if that's sort of like content, you know, kind of creation piece that you really have an opportunity to contribute to. Yeah, I love how concrete it is. It's like, don't think about this concept of product marketing. Just think about the word.

words that your potential customers and customers see. Okay. Final area I want to spend a lot of time on is totally different. It's around getting a job. Oh, yeah. Okay. You have a pretty unique approach to... finding a gig. I heard from the founder of Mode about the very unique way you approached getting a job there. I imagine Linear is a similar boat. What advice can you share with folks that are looking for a job, maybe struggling?

that worked for you when you were looking for your next gig? Product management is kind of a unique role, right? Because we do just about everything, you don't really get pigeonholed into... you know, being sort of compared along a single dimension with everyone else. And everyone who's hiring PMs, just like when they're hiring execs, they're kind of hoping that they bring them on to solve some burning problem that they have.

And so it's your job when you're in the interview process to figure out what that burning problem is. So put on your discovery hat and go figure out what is the actual job to be done of the hiring manager.

when they're bringing on a new PM onto their team. And if you can do that, right, and then make a good case that you are the person to solve that problem, then hiring you becomes a sort of like binary choice between do I... hired the solution to my problem or do i hire someone else and and i think what what ends up happening a lot is when we're you know when you're in the interview process you're just like trying to put your best foot forward trying to say that you're great at everything

you have like very few weaknesses, maybe you try too hard, like whatever it is, right? And then you, but everyone's going to say that. So you're just like one of N people. And you want to make yourself a little bit of like... just you versus the field right like you are the solution to a problem and then everyone else is uh you know sort of like a a rule of the dice so the way you're describing it is uh the company has a job to be done say it's drive growth of some feature

uh in this case it's like for linear just building a killer successful b2b product i don't know that's that's a broad one like usually you're not interviewing for head of product role so that's maybe too broad so it's like what is this PM roles job to be done at the company, and then help convince them you are the best person to solve, to do that job and solve this problem for them. Yeah. And a lot of times when you take that approach, it'll feel like you already work there.

And the way that I did this, I got advice from a friend. He said, I was interviewing for this job at Mode that you referenced. And I'm like, how should I approach it? He's like, just act like you already work there. What would you do? And then it's like, okay, I could do that. So then when you're in this interview process and someone's asking you a question, they go, do you have any questions for me? You can ask them, what are your OKRs this quarter? How can someone help you achieve those?

You can be that specific about it. They're like, oh, yeah, sure. I can tell you about the exact thing that I'm doing this quarter. And then you'll have some level of intelligence about what people are actually trying to solve.

Because I think often we just get stuck in these very high-level general types of questions. Like, what's the company goal of all that kind of stuff? And it's like, no, you can get really specific. If you were collaborating with that person in your job, what would you say to them? I love how... actionable this advice is. There's obviously an element of like this takes work and time. A lot of people are interviewing at a lot of companies trying to find a job.

Is part of your advice, like pick the ones you're most excited about and invest a lot of time in this way of interviewing? You know, you can invest a lot in the ones where you know that you're going to be able to over deliver on. If you understand what they're actually trying to solve, then you know where you're going to have both the highest chance of success of getting hired, but also doing a really great job on the other end of it.

and you talk about how you're like pretending you have the job because then you actually have this job as part of the interview process uh oftentimes as an outsider you don't have enough information to like have a really good

thought on what the solution is and maybe part of it is going to be so like wrong because you're like I don't know actually no I don't have the data do you actually try to reach out to the engineers and designers on the team to try to understand things how far do you go to try to solve these problems and show them what you can do Yeah, I mean, you're in the interview loop, right? These are people that you're going to be working closely with. So start there. Do your discovery questions.

And if there's an area that you think you want to dig, you can ask. There's no harm in asking, hey, can you put me in touch with an engineering manager who's working on the same problem? And if no one else is asking, again, you're going to have...

an extra piece of feedback from that eng manager and so yeah like this guy asked like really good questions and it seems like they're you know they're really with it like they're no one else is going to have that piece of feedback so during the during the debrief process and just asking that question alone will

show them how deeply you're thinking about this already. Yeah. Amazing. Nan, is there anything else that we have not covered that you want to touch on or share or you think might be helpful to listeners? before we get to a very exciting lightning round. You know, I have a very specific point of view on deadlines. I don't know if that's a... Let's do it. Fire away.

I think what often happens is people get depressed about deadlines. They're like, hey, here's the ship date, and then you never make it. I don't know if you've had this feeling before. Absolutely. You were an engineer before too, right? So it's just like... engineers is better like oh yeah deadlines they're just they're they're complete fabrications um and the only way to make deadlines real is to take them so seriously that they are basically like a p0 problem and like

Everything else has to not matter in comparison to the deadline because that's the only way you're going to be able to signal to the team and also to all the stakeholders that you're actually taking it seriously. So my feeling on deadlines is don't have too many of them. right and when you do uh it's a p0 so the engineer is working on it they don't get to work on anything else like someone's oh i need them for this like don't nope you're not pulling them off of anything we're doing this

As a PM, your job is to just cut as much scope as possible to make it possible to hit that deadline. What are the things actually blocking us from doing it? Because what you want to do is at the moment where you have to make the go-no-go call on whether to ship. you want to be able to actually have a product that you can say yes to. It might not have all the features you had wanted or whatever it is, and you can say no. You can make that choice, but you want to set yourself up.

to be in a position where you can actually say yes or no to something. Because what often happens is like, oh, we want this thing. Well, it's not even close to being done yet. So there's no possible way we can say yes. I can't ship it. It's like half broken.

it's like no no you want to get to a point where it works right it might not be the product that you want but it is an actual real product that you can conceivably ship so you said that uh don't have too many deadlines but when you do make sure you everyone understands these are

actual deadlines. When do you decide it's worth having a deadline? Is it like a marketing launch sort of thing? What's worthy of a deadline in your experience? Yeah, it's usually having to do with some kind of external marketing type of exercise that you're trying to try to hit.

Got it. And I think that that's the other thing that I think as builders, we can often look at launch dates and stuff like that. It's like, oh, who cares if it's a little bit... later or we skip this this changelog or whatever it is and i think that that's you know that's that's really uh i don't know it makes me go crazy when i hear people say that in all honesty um you know i i

with marketing and communication with customers, you basically have a limited amount of opportunities to do so. A year is 365 days. There are 12 months. Each of those months has about four weeks. There's some rhythm where you get to have 50-ish weeks to say something to your audience once a week. Or you get to have 12 months to say something really big or four quarters to say something huge. If you miss one of the opportunities, you don't get it back again.

You can't time travel back and say, okay, actually, let's redo first quarter and say this message that we wish we could have gotten out into the field. That is such a powerful point. I could see the sales, marketing, go-to-market element of your job coming out there. I imagine everyone that's in that feels like, yes, this is exactly right. Maybe just the last question along this line. So I love this idea of taking deadlines very seriously when you commit to a deadline.

At the same time, as you pointed out, it creates a lot of stress knowing there's a deadline we have to hit. So one lever you've mentioned is cutting scope. Another is just people spending more time estimating to have more accurate deadlines. You invest in that. How do you think about just like...

for an engineering team to come into a deadline, how much to spend on like de-risking and estimating versus just let's just do our best and then we'll cut and adjust. You know, this might be my hot take, but we do almost no estimating. in order to hit deadlines. What we do is we ship as early as we can. The thing we talked about earlier, if by the time that 10% of the time has elapsed, you have a working thing.

you can now spend the rest of the time deciding whether or not you want to do another iteration or you want to polish that thing and get it to be a shippable state. So you're kind of setting up your future self to be able to make that decision. So none of this is... You can't go into this at the very last moment and say, okay, now we have to take the deadline seriously. You have to do it from the beginning and commit to the process of going very fast, iterating early, and then...

putting yourself in a position where you can say yes or no to a product. So interesting and so different from the way most companies operate. Nan, this was everything I was hoping it'd be. I think this is going to help a lot of people build a much better product, which would be good for the world if more products are linear.

With that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, let's do it. Okay, first question. What are two or three books that you have recommended most to other people? I think the one book that I recommend the most is The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. I read it originally in college for an HCI class I was taking.

And I think of everything I've ever read, it's the thing that sort of caused me to see the world from the perspective of everything you interact with as a product. Every pencil that you use, every door that you open is a... is a product that somebody designed and is that is that the big takeaway from that book because it comes up a lot and i think in such an old book and so i guess for someone that hasn't read or maybe doesn't have time to read it

is the big takeaway for you. Someone designed everything and there's a reason things aren't great and they can be improved. Yeah. I mean, I saw this the other day. I was at a cafe in my neighborhood and I saw a kid rip a handle off a door. Like of the cafe, he like pulled it so hard. It came right off because it was a push door, but it had a handle that looked like you could pull it. And that's, that's like one of the canonical examples of the book. Yeah. Awesome.

uh next question do you have a favorite recent movie or tv show you've really enjoyed uh i've uh i watched the diplomat on on netflix i think it was um terrific you know it's really fun easy easy watch it has like some like west wing vibes if you were into that back in the day yeah have you seen the second season

Yeah, I finished second season. I wasn't as excited about the second season just to put that out there. The first season was really good and then just kind of went off a little like, OK, I guess. Yes, it's cool. But yeah, it got a little like spy thrillery, I think.

yeah yeah okay cool but still really good and on netflix okay cool do you have a favorite product you recently discovered that you really like i didn't discover it but i discovered a version of it that was really interesting um there's a there's a pen uh Actually, I have one on my desk. It's called the Sakura Micron. I don't know if you use these. It's like a felt-tip pen. It's really great, right? It was originally invented in Japan for artists to draw comic books and stuff.

And you can use it for anything. I use it for journaling or whatever. But I was on Amazon. I was trying to buy more. And I found a package that said Bible study kit. I was like, why is this labeled Bible study kit? And it was literally just the pen in like four different colors. And it was because like the thing doesn't bleed through pages. So if you have like a Bible, which they often have these kind of like really flimsy kind of newsprint pages, it's not going to bleed through.

And it's just really interesting to me that someone marketed a normal package of these pens as a Bible study kit for people who were looking for that keyword. And it was official, too. It was not something hacked together. It was actually an official packaging of this. Amazing. What a unique pen choice. Two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to and find useful in work or in life? The correct amount is too much minus one.

and i think this 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 feel bad within four was probably the right number

Right. And then if you want to find the right number, sometimes you just have to like really shoot for the edge and then find out what's too much and then you'll find out exactly what the right amount is. I love how tactical that is. Makes me think about Elon Musk's thing about cutting.

things like one of his formulas for just getting stuff done one of them is just like cut stuff before trying to optimize it and and uh and automate it and his advice is if you don't bring back 10 of things you cut you're not cutting enough yeah exactly Final question. You worked at Everlane for a number of years and you shared the rough idea of a story around a shirt, maybe our bestseller that they have now and how you helped create.

a best-selling women's shirt can you share that story uh yeah so i mean to be to be clear i i witnessed the creation i don't i don't think i had a direct hand in it but um uh yeah so you know i i I saw this advertisement the other day on Instagram for, it's called the Women's Box Cut Tee. And it's a t-shirt that's like kind of wide and short, right, for women.

And I looked and they had like 20 colors of it. And it sells super well. And I remember when we created this thing. And it was because there was a batch of defective men's t-shirts. They all came in like...

an inch and a half too short and so like we couldn't sell them right you would have your your belly button sticking out like no one wants to wear that and uh and then so what we we did was like we have to salvage the inventory because we were a very small company and we had to make cash flow and

You know, we couldn't just damage it out. So, you know, the design team and the marketing team kind of came together and they said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to cut another two inches off of this and make it really cropped, right? And market it towards women as like a cropped, boxy silhouette.

And we did that. We're like, okay, hopefully we can salvage this inventory and not have to take a ride down. It sold out in like a week. And we're like, oh, okay, I guess we just made a hit product. And it's like one of these things where... it's very hard to know what this was, right? Was this like a marketing thing? Was this a design thing? I don't know. But you just kind of come together and you find like the right product market fit in like the weirdest way.

I love that it's still going. Yeah, it's still going. Originally, it was just white. Now there's like 20 colors. Oh, man. I love how many industries you've worked in. Fashion, data analytics, project management. I don't know what's next. There's more, I imagine.

non this was incredible i really appreciate making time for this like i said i think we're gonna have helped a lot of people build better products two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and learn more and how can listeners be useful to you Yeah, I'm on X slash Twitter as the non-U. It's T-H-E and then my name. And, you know, if they have any...

feedback about Linear. We're very happy to take it, especially for people who use it in their day-to-day. We really want to hear from users. What's the best way for them to share that? Is it tweet at you? Is it go to the website? What do you recommend? Oh, yeah, you can tweet at us. You can DM me on Twitter. My DMs are open. So it's all good. Amazing. Nan, thank you so much for being here. Yeah, of course. Thankfully. Bye, everyone.

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