I think you see in the team at Linear that a lot of people don't see, which is that there's not actually a tradeoff 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 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 going to 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 feature 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 in the same way that customers 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 ton 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.
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integration nan thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast thanks for having me i'm a long 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.
I mean, it's really good to hear that because, you know, in a lot of ways, that's what we're trying to do.
You know, if you think about like the entire impetus behind why Linear was started, it's because you know cari 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 started off like building stupid MySpace pages and all of these, these
like side projects when, when we were young.
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, into our day to day workflow just was really, was really sad.
So that's what, you know, 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 a 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 is an 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 trade -off 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.
And I actually saw Patrick Halston 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 like an expert so if you look at um if you look at people who are like at the pinnacle of their craft, right?
It could be anything, it could be like a chef or a programmer or, you know, 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, right?
They're going really fast and it's like, they're obviously not like being sloppy and then 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 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 uh these different
variations is by just going very fast in terms of speed is the speed they're moving quickly on each of those iterations like what does speed look like when you say it can be done quickly and high quality what does speed look like uh speed what it really looks like is but you know you have some rough
time budget for how long you think something is 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 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 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 you know they're 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.
You know, we don't have any expectation that the first version of it is going to be great, right?
That is not in the cards, right?
Like, 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 like all sanded down and really, you know, really in tip -top shape, right?
It just has to work and get the job done and, you know, 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 maxim as devious misinformation spread by the slow.
In my experience, slow and expensive usually go together.
Yeah, exactly. I mean use the the contractor kind of example like if someone's making modifications in your house and it's taking forever like one you're you're in a hotel and also the the bills are adding up the other example is when we were chatting about this earlier is chess 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 uh this is the case and like you know magnus and hikaru and all those all those guys who are at the at the top of their game you know
they can they can go unbelievably fast in fact that's that's the usual i mean i don't want to get too out of my depth with chess but the usual way you you uh try to make the game fair you give them much much less time right than someone who's uh not quite as strong of a player and they'll 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 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, you know, validation there.
And to sort of really focus on getting the smallest kind of shippable element.
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 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 uh 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 uh 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'll 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 right like when you go like hey like do you have any questions for us like this is the question that we're gonna get right so um we hear quite a lot and uh and i it's very sensible for them to ask it right because they they see you know sort
of history being kind 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 stuff that we absolutely have to say no to is also the exact kind of thing that leads to this kind of like bloatedness that makes ICs kind of hate their lives.
And 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 no debate because we've already thought about it.
And this is the thing that 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 you know linear is so much uh faster it's so much easier to use that it makes my my work so much more enjoyable like this is the reason because we
have not taken a single step in this direction uh 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 any 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 going to make our reporting like nicer so like you know the the uh you know the director is going to be really excited by this and we'll definitely make a buying decision based off of this and we have to kind of convince them that this is a false
trade -off right the whole premise is wrong because the moment you start going down this path and you make um 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 uh and then you know i'm going to just focus on on my actual job and then all your reporting is wrong because all the data is wrong and it's like
sparse and you know you get situations where people will um you know they'll they'll say like well here's a drop down 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 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 of 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 i love that it's around reporting almost always it sounds like so i want to track what's happening yeah exactly it's always i want to track what's happening well what do you want to track well i want to track uh which you know like which uh
version of the product this thing's tied to you know based on some some field information it's like okay like how is the person working on is supposed to even know that information well it takes a fight it takes like a five minute scavenger hunt every single time it's like i don't think they're gonna 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.
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 like you know we had to make like saml and skim and that kind of stuff it's like sure we're going to do those sorts of like 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 of the app's like value
proposition 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 companies right the current situation we're
in it's 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 and maybe and thing is it's not everything you want right because like if people come with a laundry list and it's like laundry list here's here's 10 things i want you're like 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 was 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
like you're not you're a new business you started i think mid -market startups and now you're working right up and so uh i think it's 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 anything of that but it seems
to be going well expanding a market uh yeah i mean growth has been good growth in enterprise has been you know leading the other segments uh 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 is based on uh 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 uh jeffrey more in 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, uh, I love new stuff and I'm going to, an early adopter kind of evangelist, but you
need someone that's like traditional old school takes their time to start to adopt it for you to be like, oh, okay, now maybe I should really take it seriously.
I also think that with this kind of, this particular category of tool, uh, 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 uh 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 they're 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 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 in here.
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 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 a specific person okay
yeah yeah exactly um 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 uh to reality in that way is um you
know 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 uh 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 it 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 i think a trap that a lot of times pms will fall into is they will make something and they'll they'll make some choices
in it because you know maybe it's beautiful or it's elegant but they don't go the the step of like is reality also beautiful and elegant because reality is kind of ugly sometimes and if you have a beautiful good solution that doesn't match with reality It doesn't really matter.
People can look at it and they can ooh and ah, but if they don't use it to get their work done, it's never going to have long -term staying power.
Do you have a heuristic of how often you need to hear something for you to 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...
Not once that's 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 um in the uh sort of first you know kind of bit of the life of a particular
feature right you release the thing and you start getting feedback about it it doesn't quite fit reality and uh 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 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 uh right or wrong there that's one sort of category another category is just you you're getting um you know you're getting requests for maybe a very big feature uh or a 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 a hundred different use cases so there 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 uh of use cases for this um that really make a lot of sense to kind of adopt as a as a sort of first order uh type of feature um so i think those are the two sort of strategies that we um 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, not there's like 100 people generally asking for this thing and let's build what we think is a general solution.
Yeah. 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, right?
For B2B companies, this is very relevant and the reason we did this is because we kept getting this request for uh you know for like fully customized fields right and we would be like well what is it that you want with your custom fields because you know the problem is you add 100 custom fields and all
your ic start hitting it right so like we don't want to go down that path but like what is it actually you're trying to do and like 40 percent of them were because well i have a customer you know like you know walmart or whatever right like walmart asked for this feature and it's really important i
need everyone to know that walmart needs this I need to track in I need to see like how 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 uh 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 gonna hook
up with your customer support tools we're gonna hook up with your crms we're gonna automatically bring in like feedback from these companies we're gonna analyze the emails where they're coming from and then we're just if 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 you 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 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 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're 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 it's funny because i think from the outside right i'm
i'm on these sales calls and then the the ae or someone's like watch me ask these questions and i think often they're like what are you doing like you're you're you're just you're just like asking questions from angles that i 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 you can do the normal analytical thing and be like ask five whys and like try to figure out like well what are your goals and you know as a 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 this thing like i can't accomplish this goal so what so i'm not gonna get promoted at work like okay well great i understand the severity of your problem at this point right like
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 you know i i had this thing happen
where uh i marked the the ship date of this project as december 30th because it's a q4 project and i wanted to put it at the you know very end and then uh 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 as you get you keep asking questions to understand what it like the moment they felt bad about something in this case the deadline.
Yeah. And it's, you know, if you, if you ask somebody in that, in that last story, like, like, you know, what, what, you know, what kind of issue 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. They, but it tells you, it's like, you had this terrible moment of communication that was just, it felt like miscommunicated and you're, you're like, it's just going to keep happening over and over again.
And so, you know, the thing that we did specifically to solve this was we, you know, on projects and 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 q4 project you can say it's a second half of 2024 project
like whatever you're happy promising you can just put it on there and that way you never feel you never feel like you have to like give this this uh sense of like 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 yeah there's a lot of connection here i know this idea of emotions and feeling bad as 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 the background of this right i've worked in very very competitive industries you know i worked at everlane which was like a direct -to -consumer clothing brand uh i worked at mode which is like bi tools and there's like
so many bi tools out there and then obviously linear like we're you know we're project management there's a lot of project management tools and i i think the more competitive your your industry is the 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 have been asking like well like you know like what's what's your goal like what is your job to be done all this kind of stuff and uh so you have to kind of look at things from uh an angle that other people might not have seen and for for me right and for us it's it's
the the angle of of like where are the emotional hooks uh 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 i think i think it's probably under explored because um 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 uh so like i think that's the opportunity right you can sort of see where are you feeling back through every day where you don't even know right you might think i hate mondays right like what do you why do you
hate mondays well on mondays 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 gave you a button that made the report and would that help it's 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 through it blind to it and and it's true right you 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, I shared a couple, but just where you've noticed this in someone using maybe a competitor or even Linear that you solved?
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 sort of 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 people will be able to respond to it in a sort of organized manner.
Right. And I think this, you know, this kind of automation, this, this feature, it came out of two different fields before happening.
Like one, people were trying to implement this stuff by hand and it was just a lot of touches.
Right. And they were doing it, but they, you know, they felt like, Oh, I'm totally underwater.
Why are you underwater?
Well, I have to like manage all these, you know, throw all these tickets around and route them correctly and stuff like that.
And they didn't sort of see this as like an opportunity to have a tool, you know, specialize in managing their triage queue.
They just like, because they were managing by hand and they were on top of it.
Right. 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.
Like 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.
They're all kind of the same root cause, which is like there wasn't a very automated, organized way to deal with your triage queue.
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I'm going to try to summarize some of the secrets of linear success so far.
So the first is get something out as quickly as possible, say in the first 10 % 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 and 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 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 feel 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 the the part we said like focus on uh focus on the user i i think it's it's maybe a little bit more subtle than that there's
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 times
as you've been talking is also something Patrick Collison 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 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 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 like reevaluate okay what is our
current understanding of how we might best approach this thing and i think it's something that people sort of struggle with is like they might have this model in their head like a pm might have this on their head about how user behaves but it's just like 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 like engage
with and also contribute is there an example of something that's sitting at roadmap i don't know if you can share these sort of things that just i started 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 um capacity planning
is a thing that's been sitting in our in our backlog and uh it's 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 infra thing.
And 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, right?
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 users that are struggling with this problem we will like you know get on a call with them and sit down with them and 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 i 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 have a good starting point for them to sort of like reason about it and uh and so i think a lot of like building conviction around stuff is 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 like 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 uh keeps you from taking on these things too early because uh you don't
have the engineers to build new designers yeah that's uh that's true i actually hadn't really uh put that part together but i think that's you know i think i think some of the reason we we've done it this way is because we you know we don't have the bandwidth of action everything so we we kind of like
you'll have this uh this backlog that we maintain to make sure that we when we do uh take it on we're 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.
Something that 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 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 i think like i don't know you guys did it at every and b but i think brian cheskey talks about like like what like what's the 11 star experience is that that thing you guys did that it was the he talked about there's always a yeah there's always a push of what's like the 10x version of some idea when you
when you think in that way right when you're saying like hey what's the you know what's the 11 star experience uh what you're what you're really asking is like hey what's like the most luxurious version of this this like hotel stay or like what's the most unforgettable incredible, you know, kind of experience
we can give people.
And you throw away things like, I don't know, like, like, 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 like 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 you know we talk about like um we're
talking about like product decisions like oh yeah you have like these choices like what are you going to decide no there's all this decision making kind of uh uh you know i'm a theory right but like the the biggest risk is you didn't see the right choice to begin with right you have these three choices
and like none of them were right it's this fourth one that was like over in this corner but you didn't look in that corner so you never found it and uh so i i think the whole goal of this is to try to you know expand and the the surf space right of what you're trying to do so what you're saying is people
often uh don't think uh out of the box enough by kind of not thinking too radically enough and so the choices they're deciding between are just like oh meh options and there's this process of breaking out of that and uh 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 yeah what's the craziest yeah but you're saying that actually is what you do and that actually works really well uh yeah and you know you do and you actually build it right you you can think of a a very extreme version of a product and 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 like 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 like what the right actual answer is because we have seen this area of the product space and really felt it awesome let's uh let's talk about an example of this because this feels awesome uh yeah i i can i can talk to an example actually is it okay if i demo something absolutely let's
do it let me show and tell do that right now here we go we're gonna share a screen all right um so this is just like a like a demo space uh instead of linear so the the the feature where we did this that i i remember very clearly because it was kind of recent, is we built this feature to save drafts
for your issues. So when you're as hard as an issue tracker, if I make a new issue, and let's say I'm trying to report a bug or something, so it's like I make a bug report, then 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.
Note to self, figure out the actual repro steps and do it.
so 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 uh version of this right we're like the most what do we want to do like linear's about getting 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'll 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 we if you close this and we don't like ask if you want to save change you might feel like oh i just lost my changes on accident
we knew that going in right we built this anyway and uh yeah it felt super unsafe right it turns out that they are that that that sort of inkling that we had was true right but when we really felt exactly how how unsafe it was uh so then we were like okay well what's the safest thing we could possibly
do? The safest thing is just autosave everything.
So you start a new issue, and then you start typing some stuff, and it's just 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 a paper trail of things you change your mind about.
You've probably had this happen in document tools where you have a whole bunch of things in your space called like untitled document or like new document and stuff like that.
So many untitled folders.
Yeah, so many untitled folders, right?
Yeah, because the moment you like said new folder it like starts saving it and then you don't actually need for that to happen.
So 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 drafts, 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 like, okay, I'm going to keep working on it, but then I get interrupted again, then I'm just going to auto save it for you.
There's no point. I'm not going to ask you again.
I'm always going to auto save 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.
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, if they did a detailed teardown of these decisions, they might say, 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.
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?
Is this like the way you think most companies should operate these sorts of attributes?
Do you think it's like 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 tradeoff that we have to make.
It's a very extreme point of view to do that.
Or you might say, the price is always predictable, but sometimes you can't have a car in the first place.
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, interbeing is 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 thing 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 i did this a lot actually at just like testing the extreme uh so it super resonates this idea and when you say test so was it like you build
it and play with it do 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 the super fast version that was a little that was unsafe that only went internal and everyone
felt it was too unsafe but then then we thought okay let's go to super safe version and then we roll that out and everyone started having a whole bunch of now we did the 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 아 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 hmm 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 like accumulation of information.
Talk about that because I thought that was really fascinating.
You know, I think like 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 like all of their, you know, colleagues can now like press on buttons and good things happen.
And then they turn that process and that tool, you know, they spin it off into a startup and they like make a startup, right?
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 a 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 like you you're organizing stuff in the campaigns you're measuring
click -through rates you're like calculating you know cost of acquisition and all that stuff probably comes equipped with a tool because those are the right practices to do when you're when you're doing this sort of uh marketing exercise and you know whether you knew about it before right or you learned
it from uh from the tool like as a as a buyer for uh for this kind of product what i'm doing is i'm saying like hey i'm gonna bring in this baseline level 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 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 they have to you know it's doing deep surgery they have to read redo all of their uh internal processes and the way they manage 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
know you you're actually doing good, like 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 is best to do.
This connects a couple 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 why we 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 gonna avoid letting people customize too much because we know they'll have a bad time and then two is just this idea of uh 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 it's definitely connected in a way and i i think sometimes when when people talk about um 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 like kind of arbitrary right like your opinion in my opinion they're just two opinions man like like you know neither is right or wrong what we try to do is find where there's actual consensus right amongst a lot of different uh 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 button so that they can start practicing this right when when when a company we see companies like doing really good job of managing their triage queue and but you
know it's like you know it's very manual 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 the practice within their or two so i think a takeaway here is when you
choose a tool uh recognize it's going to change the way you operate and be thoughtful about is this 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 right like when you when you talk to people and like hey like 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 you know here's how they 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 i feel like in organizations you actually see kind of like some antagonism between product and and like sales and marketing uh and i think that's kind of a shame right because you know
when when we uh come kind of come together the way we think about um you know the the way that we think about selling is a matter of like especially because we sell to we still 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 help our marketing team like pick exactly like the right word and the right phrasing to make a sound like native to the language that our customers speak and also talking about engineers is my is my 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 she's always crafting the language for whatever upcoming release that we're uh we're building and you know working with directly with the teams and trying to figure out how to talk about it.
And then once we, you know, go out and build the campaigns, um, build assets and things like that, like that's where, that's where a lot of the language is coming from.
It's coming from the work that she's doing.
Uh, and then, you know, with sales, like they're validating all that message, like in the field, right.
They're, they're saying the words to customers directly and telling you if it's like sticking or not.
And then you can kind of like, you know, have a really good feedback cycle, uh, between those three disciplines.
What I've seen you, uh, refer to this way of working as, as a double triangle, which is i think a compliment to like the pm engineer designer you talk about that and give us a visual what that looks like yeah you know i think pms right like product managers we we often have a tough time like trying
to explain like what what is your job right like you know it's like a little bit everything and i i think the you know 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 of the commercial like motivations and goals of the company and making sure that what you build actually solves for those uh those goals and you know you're you're sort of tempering that with like what's you know possible and uh and sort of where the opportunities are to
actually build stuff so i like to me like it's 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 was always in the middle indeed uh 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 the brian justy's whole thing about how pms are or should be doing marketing and so the way they changed at erb 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 collaborating with engineering 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 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 right there's always like demand gen and figuring out channel strategy and all this kind of stuff like sure right that's a pure marketing concern but actually picking the words and what where the emphasis is like
you should understand the customer at a pretty deep level probably deeper than any other uh like group at the company because you know because of the the kinds of requirements gather in discovery that you're doing so you're gonna find you're gonna know the native language that your customers speak a lot
better and uh you know help your marketing team originate those words got it so basically be really involved in the in the product marketing the writing the the emails the headlines the website yeah yeah exactly and so i know like the word product marketing is also so overloaded they do so many different
things and it but it's that sort of like content you know kind of creation piece that's uh that you really have an opportunity to contribute to yeah i love how concrete that is it's like don't think about this concept product marketing just think about the words that your potential customers and customer
seat okay uh final area i want to spend a little time on is totally different it's around getting a job oh yeah okay you have a pretty unique uh approach to finding a gig uh 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 uh
what what advice can you share with folks that are looking for a job may be struggling that work for you when you were looking for your next gig product management is kind of a unique role right like because we do just about everything there you don't really get pigeonholed into you know being sort
of compared along a single dimension uh with everyone else and everyone who's hiring pms just like when they're hiring execs they're they're kind of hoping that they bring them on to solve some burning problem that they they have and uh So it's your job when you're in the interview process to figure
out what that burning problem is, right?
So like put on your discovery hat, right?
And you go figure out like what is the actual sort of like 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 hire the a 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, where you're in a 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, 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 a you know sort of like 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 role's job to be done at the company and then help convince them you 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.
Right. And like the way that I did this, I got advice from a friend.
He said like, 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, you know, someone's asking you a question, they go, you have any questions for me?
like you can ask them like what are your okrs this quarter how can someone help you achieve those right you can like be that specific about it like like oh yeah sure i can tell you about like the exact thing that i'm doing this quarter and then then you'll have some level of intelligence about like
what's you know what people are actually trying to solve because i think often we just like get stuck like in these very high level general types of questions like oh what are you know 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 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 pick the ones you're most excited about and invest a lot of time in this way of interviewing?
You can invest a lot in the ones where you know that you're going to be able to over deliver on, right?
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 like doing a really great job on the other end of it.
And you talk about how you're like, pretend you have the job because then you actually have this job as part of the interview process.
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 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 know you're in the interview loop right these are people that you're going to be working closely with so start
start there right do do your discovery questions and uh if there's an area that you think you want to dig you can ask you know there's there's no harm asking hey can you put me in touch with an engineering manager who's like working on the same problem and and you know if no one else is asking again you're
gonna have an extra piece of feedback from that inch manager and so yeah like this guy asks 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 non 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 uh you know i i have a very specific uh point of view
on deadlines i don't know if that's a let's do it fire away yeah i i think like what often happens is people get depressed about deadlines right they's like hey here's the here's the ship date and then you never make it you know i don't know if you've had this feeling before uh 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 that's the 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 you know my My feeling on deadlines is don't have too many of them, right?
And when you do, it's a P0.
So the engineers are 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, right?
Like 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, right?
It doesn't, it might not have all the features you had wanted or whatever it is and you can say no, right?
You can make that choice but you want to set yourself up to be in a position where you can actually say yes to no to something because like 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, right?
I can't ship it. It's just, it's like half broken.
It's like, no, 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 uh 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 it's it's usually having to do with some kind of external uh marketing type of exercise that you're you're trying to try to hit got it and uh and i think that that's like the other thing that i i think as as builders we, we,
we can often look at like launch dates and stuff like that.
It's like, Oh, you know, who cares if it's a little bit later or we skip this, this change log 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, with marketing communication customers, you basically have a limited amount of, of opportunities to do so.
Right. A year is 365 65 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 those opportunities, you don't get it back again.
You can't time travel back and say, like, okay, actually, let's redo first quarter and say this message that we wish we could have gone down into the into the field that is such a powerful point uh i could see the sales uh marketing go -to -market element of your job coming out there uh 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 uh 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, right, is we ship as early as we can.
So if, you know, the thing we talked about earlier where like, 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 setting up your future self to be able to make that decision.
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 much better product, which would be good for the world if more products are like linear.
With that, we reached a 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, right?
Every single, you know, every pencil that you use, every door that you open is a product that somebody designed.
and is that is that the big takeaway for 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 uh someone designed everything and there's a reason things aren't great and and they
can be improved yeah i mean i i saw this the other day i was at a cafe uh 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 is the normand doors are just mysteries 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 uh yeah i finished the second season yeah 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 okay i guess
yes it's cool but yeah it got a little uh 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 i have one on my desk it's like it's called like the sakura micron i don't know if you use these it's like a felt -tip pen it's really great right like you know it was originally invented like in japan for like artists to like draw like like comic books and stuff and uh
you know you can use it for anything you gotta use it for journaling or whatever uh but i i i was on amazon i was looking you know i was trying to buy more and i found a package that said like a bible study kit i was like why is why is this labeled bible study kit and it was it was literally just the pen
and like 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 uh and it's really interesting to me that someone marketed
like a normal package of these pens as a bible study kit and for people who like were looking for that keyboard and it's like it was like official too it's not some something hacked together it was like actually like 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 the correct amount is too much minus one and I think this this like kind of ties into like to 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 uh 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 uh you shared the rough idea of a story around a shirt maybe our best seller that they have now uh 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 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 uh on instagram for for it's called the women's box cut t and it's it's a it's a t -shirt that's like kind of wide and short right for women
and uh and i i looked and they had like 20 colors of it.
And it's like, I re and it's, it sells super well.
And I remember when we, when we created this thing and it was because there was a batch of, um, 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 cashflow and, you know, we couldn't just, we couldn't just damage it out.
So, uh, 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, uh, and we, we did that.
We're like, okay, hopefully, you know, hopefully we can, we can salvage this, this inventory and not have to like take a ride down.
It's sold out in like a week and we're like, oh, okay, I guess we just made a hit product.
And it's, it's like one of these things where, uh, 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 we just kind of come together and you find like the right product market fit and like the weirdest way.
I love that it's still going.
Yeah, it's still going.
Like 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, you know, we're very happy to take it, especially, you know, for people who kind of like 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. Thank you so much for listening.
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