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

23:36We have this exact that's really wedded to this other tool. But those things change. So we keep in contact with them. They're in our CRM where we make sure we follow up. We've had a lot of these where we've been said no to two years ago. And now we have some new features and go, yeah, it seems like you're ready for our scale or whatever. You mentioned that when you have these debates and questions that come out, you have features of a company once. 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 and I see once 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 is trying to figure out exactly who's going to use it, what are the actual real life use cases that we know about?

24:39Like 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. So tying it all the way back to real people. Like a specific person. Like a specific person. Yeah, exactly. Not a hypothetical person, right? Not one that you made up, like Alice Bob or whatever it is. 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 away back to reality in that way is a big part of how we really think about and discuss these things. This connects us the way I think about my newsletter is I always try to answer the question of very specific, like a person actually asked, not a general sense of something people may be interested in.

25:25And 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 someone 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 Be 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 to the step of like Is reality also beautiful and elegant because reality is kind of ugly sometimes and if you have a beautiful Agustal solution that doesn't match with reality. It doesn't really matter right people can like look at it and they can, they can oon, ah, but if they don't use it to get their work done, it's never gonna have like long term staying power.

26:01Do you, do you have a heuristic of how often you need to hear something for you to, could be just convinced this is worth investing in? You know, people may hear this, oh, one Bob wants this featured, that doesn't make sense to 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, 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.

26:33So 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 a thing and then you start getting feedback about it about it. 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. 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 requests for maybe a very big feature or feature set from a lot of different people.

27:10But then you dig in and you try to say, okay, well, tell me about how you're trying to use this. There's like a hundred different use cases. So you have choices here. You can either build the big feature that covers all the long tail use cases or you can try to see if there's really concentrated pools of use cases for this that really make a lot of sense to adopt as a first order type of feature. So I think those are the two strategies that we employ the most. Did we think about this wrong? And now we're just learning something about how I match the reality. Or for this big general feature that people are asking for, are there actually more specific use cases that we should be solving and we should be solving really, really well?

27:51So, 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 ICvers, the middle manager, in this case, it's like, let's talk to the person actually asking for this thing, not there's like a hundred 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.

28:26And 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 a very relevant. And the reason we did this is because we kept getting this request for, 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 the problem is you add 100 custom fields and all your ICs start hating 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, Walmart or whatever, Walmart asks for this feature and it's really important.

29:04I need everyone to know that Walmart needs this. I need to track in, I need to see how we can report on what have we done for Walmart over the past year so that when my CSM has a 101 conversation with a rep, they can like you have some kind of evidence that we've been doing stuff for them, like all those kinds of stuff. Okay, cool. Like, that's, that sounds like a very useful and powerful thing you want to do. But how do you expect people to like tag these as well manually? Because that's how we did in our spreadsheets. It's like, okay, how cool. Instead of that, we're going to hook up with your customer support tools.

29:35We're going to hook up with your CRNs. We're going to automatically bring in like feedback from these companies. We're going to analyze the emails where they're coming from. And then we're just, if someone requests a feature that gets escalated into engineering, it'll just be tagged with what fast forward. 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 I see his lives harder. In fact, it makes them feel more confident because when they're building a thing, they actually understand like who's asking for it and exactly what the email said.

30:00So when 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 tell me that customer, uh, 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 you is with the way you ask questions on customer calls and just keep digging and digging until you get to something that is, is an insight for you.

30:39And 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 we'll 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 in the the the A or someone's like watching me ask these questions. And I think often they're like, like, what are you doing?

31:08Like, 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 can do the normal analytical thing, be like, ask five wise 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 thing.

31:39Like 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 get there, right? You can ask people directly like how do you feel and like they're not necessarily going to tell you. But if you have along enough and deep enough conversation with them, you start to sort of level with them, 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 have this thing happen where 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.

32:28And then my marketing team lost their mind because they're like, we can't ship something at December 30th. Everyone's on vacation, right? And you're like, and then they're like, yeah, this may be really bad. So I don't ever want to put dates on things ever again. Right. So like, okay, cool. We can really 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 make sure that you never have to have that bad feeling again. People talk about empathy. Like, can you have empathy as a piano? I mean, you know, build empathy the best product leaders have empathy in this.

32:56I think it's such a succinct and powerful way of describing what empathy that he actually looks like as a product leader, which is I wanna 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 what, like the moment they felt bad about something in this case, the deadline. Yeah, and if you asked somebody in that last story, like, what kind of issue do you have? You're like, oh, marketing and I would just never align on anything. That doesn't really tell you what's going on, right? when it tells you it's like you had this terrible moment of communication.

33:31That was just it felt like Mr. McKinney 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 we, you know, on projects in linear, you can just specify of target date at whatever level of granular that 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 like you have to give this sense of false precision so that it ends up with a whole bunch of miscommunication down the line.

34:03I could see why people love linear as 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. There's 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 sort of set the background of this, right? I worked in very, very competitive industries. I worked at Everlane, which was like a direct consumer clothing brand. I worked at Mode, which was like BI tools and there's like so many BI tools out there and then obviously with linear, like we're project management, there's a lot of project management tools.

34:45And I think the more competitive your industry is, the more the sort of like low -hanging goal -oriented stuff is already picked, right? Because every PM from everyone in this company has been asking, well, what's your goal? What has your job to be done and all this kind of stuff? And so you have to look at things from an angle that other people might not have seen. And for me, and for us, it's the angle of where are the emotional hooks that you're experiencing as you go through your work day, as you use our product, as you use competitors products. I think it's probably under explored because I don't know.

35:27I feel like PMs and engineers were very think -y people. We don't really, you know, we avoid the touchy -feely stuff. And so I think that's the opportunity. You can sort of see, where are you feeling back through a day where you don't even know? You might think, I hate Mondays. Why do you hate Mondays? Well, on Mondays, I have to go out and gather a whole bunch of stuff, the Brightness Report that's really annoying. Oh, so if I gave you a button that made the report, and that helps, yeah, yeah, then I I might not, he Monday so much. And so like, I think Paul Graham has a word for this. He calls it, he calls it schlep blindness, right?

35:57Like 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 you're like, kind of note the spots where you could really use a lot of improvement. Is there an example? I mean, 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 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.

36:34And what it does is it sort of systemizes this thing where like if I put an issue into a different team, right, if I'm asking them to do something or I'm reporting above to them, it sticks 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 an organized manner. I think 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. They were doing it, but they felt like, oh, I'm totally underwater. Why are you underwater?

37:12while I have to manage all these, you know, throw 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, you know, specialized in managing their triage queue. They just, like, because they were managing my hand, 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.

37:36I don't know where they are. They end up in all these holes, right? And then the people on the other side, I'd be like, I throw tickets over the wall, I have no idea what I'm doing. Like I have no expectation that people are ever gonna respond to. So like there's all of these like bad view and that people are having, they're all kind of the same group cause, which is like there wasn't a very automated organized way to deal with your triage queue. Marketers, I know that you love TLD yards, so let me get right to the point. Weeks studio gives you everything you need to cater to any client at any scale, all in one place.

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38:40And when you're ready for more, Wix Studio grows with you. Add your own code, create custom integrations with Wix made APIs, or leverage robust native business solutions. Drive real client growth with Wix Studio. Go to WixStudio .com. I'm going to try to summarize some of the secrets of a 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 data users and people that are aware of they're using early stuff. Two is, I've heard that I see in the user basically versus the buyer or the middle manager that wants reporting and all these custom features.

39:23So 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 fee, fuel 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 where you said like focus on, focus on the user.

39:57I think it's maybe a little bit more self -reliant. There's a new ones which is like, find where the incentives are really misaligned amongst your user base. There's a middle manager that wants really detailed reporting. And I see who just really doesn't want to go through all those extra steps. And the incentives for what they want are just very misaligned. And you have to find those situations and be pretty judicious about how you make those trade -offs and where you can really find kind of like when when when outcomes there. And it's a really important nuance. Something else that's come through a couple times as you've been talking is also something Patrick Lawson tweeted once that has stuck with me which is this idea of having a mental model in your head of the user.

40:42So the way he described it and the way you've described it is oftentimes people are like cool we're gonna figure out what to build we're gonna do a bunch of research talk 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 and 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 imagine.

41:13Or, oh, wow, this is exactly what we've been thinking. 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 opportunities that we could possibly explore, right? Just product opportunities, right? Like problems to solve areas to, you know, to kind of improve for our users. But they're not, they're not like ready yet, right? They're like, we don't have enough conviction around how we might approach it.

41:45So 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 sort of struggle with is they might have this model on their head, like a PM might have this model on their head about how user behaves, but it's just like very hard to share that with someone else that you have to, you have to like telepathically throw it into their brain and it which is hard, right? So what we try to do is kind of identify areas is that we might attack with a product, but also keep an up to date analysis of each of those areas so that everyone can engage with it and also contribute.

42:22Is there an example of something that's sitting here, Rodman? But enough you could share these sort of things. I'm sorry, sitting in the backlog, you're just like, we're not quite ready to tackle this yet, but here's something we're inkling on. Yeah, sure, capacity planning is a thing that's been sitting in our backlog. And it's something that we see managers struggle with all the time, which is like, I have a limited amount of personnel and resources, and I need to deploy them in such a way where we can theoretically accomplish our roadmap, but also we don't get blocked by some bottleneck. We don't end up blocking all of the projects because this one engineer is stuck on some infrastructure thing.

42:59That's something people struggle with all the time. All the solutions out there are bad. The best solution is a very, very custom spreadsheet that someone would make, And it's a lot about keep. 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. And I don't think we've quite crafted 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 users that are struggling with this problem, we will get on a call with them and sit down with them and talk through it.

43:30And the idea there is keep informing this mental model, keep informing what this could be until you get to a place I said, okay, cool, I think we figured out what will really solve this problem in an elegant way. Yeah. And I want to really stress a new one here, which is like, it's not that we want to solve the entire problem. The entire problem is quite big, right? But there's something that's really right for linear to do that will help people have a good starting point for them to reason about it. And so I think a lot of building conviction around stuff is not even, do we have a workable 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 Overpromising and not being able to deliver on it.

44:12I 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 new designers. Yeah, that's that's true I actually hadn't really put that part together, but I think that's you know I think I'm some of the reason we we've done it this way is because we you know We don't have the bandwidth to action everything So we kind of like you'll have this this backlog that we maintain to make sure that we when we do 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 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.

45:01It'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 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 what direction to go. So the way that we try to do it is we ask a question which is like, how extreme can you take it?

45:34Like 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 it at Airbnb, but I think Brian Chesky talks about like, like what's the 11 star experience? Is that the thing you guys did? It was the thing he talked about. But there's always a push of what's like the 10x version of some idea. When you think in that way, when you're saying, what's the CLM star experience? What you're really asking is, what's the most luxurious version of this hotel stay? Or what's the most unforgettable experience we can give people?

46:10And you throw away things like cost. You throw away things like practicality. 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 defaults. We have all of these constraints that we're operating under that we kind of psychically have in the back of our heads that we just don't even realize we have them, so just a break past all of them. And then you can really see what your options are. We talk about product decisions, it's like, oh yeah, you have these choices.

46:45What are you going to decide? There's always decision making kind of a theory, right? But like the biggest risk is you didn't see the right choice to begin with. You have these three choices that 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 so I think the whole goal of this is to try to expand the search space, right? 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, oh man, options.

47:23And there's this process of breaking out of that. And I think there's like, I think you could hear this and be like, yes, 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. Yeah. And you know, you do and you actually build it, right? you can think about a very extreme version of a product of things like, hey, like, let's actually, for the first version, 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 it like, this is the most extreme version of the answer.

47:55So let's build that as fast as we can and see how it feels. And then we're gonna learn so much about like what the right actual answer is because we've 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, I can talk to an example. Actually, is it okay if I demo something? Absolutely. Let's do it. Let me show and tell you to 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 as we built this feature to save drafts for your issues.

48:31Right? So linear, you know, it's hard as an issue tracker. 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 I might start thinking through, okay, what are the repro steps, and then I start typing them. And this happens all the time, right? We know our work is doing this, and then someone distracts you, someone pings you one slack, or you have to go to a meeting, or something like that. You're like, I gotta 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.

48:56So, what can you do? Well, you wanna save it as a draft. So, we're like, okay, this is the problem. And the first version of this, right? We're like, what do we wanna 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 it as draft. If you decide to not, you want to throw it away. You don't want it. Just hit the x button, which is 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.

49:24Right? 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 like ask you 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 yeah, it felt super unsafe, right? Turns out that sort of inkling that we have was true, right? But we really felt exactly how unsafe it was. So then we were like, okay, well, what's the safest thing we could possibly do? Right, the safest thing is just auto -save everything, right?

49:54So you start a new issue and then you start typing some stuff and it's just like auto -saving as soon as you type a single character. And that did feel quite safe. So cool. But it also ended up like leaving behind like a whole bunch of, you know, like a paper trail of things you change your mind about, right? You know, you've probably had this happen in like document tools where you have a whole bunch of things in your in your space called like untitled document or like new document or stuff like that. It's just like many anti folders. Yeah, so many anti folders, right? It's because yeah, because the moment you like said new folder, it like start saving it and then you don't actually need for that to happen.

50:32So, you know, we had those two sort 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 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 but then I get interrupted again, then I'm just gonna auto -save before you. There's no point.

51:05I'm not gonna ask you again. I'm always gonna auto -save because I'm not gonna 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 a existing draft that you're messing around with, we're just gonna auto -save everything. And someone doing a sort of analysis, right? If they did a detailed tear down 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 need.

51:39Such 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 or 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, your business is making people?

52:14It 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 a price and make that happen. It's always going to be available. So here's the trade -off that we have to make. It's like 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 in 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, Brian Jessica, and her being the OZA big concept of working backwards from the ideal.

52:46Let'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 single, not the ideal, but it'll give us insight into a version of the ideal in 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 tests, 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 you learn and iterate?

53:23Yeah, we rolled out some of these versions to people. Oh, okay. The super fast version that was unsafe, that only went internal. Everyone felt it was too unsafe. But then we thought, let's go to the super safe version and then we rolled that out and everyone started having a whole bunch of, we did the, how many drafts are people doing? This is too many. The people are leaking behind this crazy paper trail. We got to figure out 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 gonna work long term, but it will teach you.

53:56Yeah, 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.

54:28It's also teaching them how to work and it's kind of this accumulation of information. You 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'd like make a start.

55:03But this process repeats thousands of times. So when you adopt that tool, you're not just adopting like 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 if you're a marketing person, and you adopt some marketing software, you're not just saying, okay, now I can write emails instead of the people. There's all sorts of process around that. Like 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.

55:39And whether you knew about it before, or you learned it from the tool, as a buyer for this kind of product, what I'm doing is I'm saying, hey, I'm gonna bring in this baseline level of marketing competency into my organization, that this is the worst we can do is whatever the tool defaults are. Interesting. So it's, you're basically by into a way of working when you're adopting a piece of software, or not just have this problem I need solved. Yeah, exactly. And I think the most salient example of this is if you've ever seen a company adopt like an ERP product, it's the most painful thing you can imagine, right?

56:20They have to, you know, it's doing deep surgery. They have to redo all of their internal processes in 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 they are making sure that you're actually doing good management of resources. So 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.

56:50You have a very opinionated way of here's how you should operate in order to build a great functioning product or a 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 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 it 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 kept in a way and I think sometimes when when people will talk about you mentioned like being opinionated.

57:27And 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 you're opinion in my opinion, they're just two opinions, man. 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 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 the company we see companies do a really good job of managing their triage queue and but you know, it's like, you know, it's very manual.

58:02Okay, 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 or two. So I think it take away here is when you choose a tool, recognize it's going to change the way you operate and be thoughtful about 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 you said you're on all the sales calls Is there anything that you can share about how you collaborate internally?

58:37Have the different functions collaborate that maybe unlike how other companies operate that might be helpful for them to learn from? Yes, something that's worked really really well for us is we think of product management as 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, 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, here's how they interact and collaborate. And we all kind of understand why that's useful, why that's helpful.

59:12But this sort of other form of collaboration between product management, sales and marketing, I think it's something that's like probably really under -examined. And often, I feel like in organizations you actually see kind of like some antagonism between product and like sales and marketing. And I think it's kind of a shame, right? Because 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 we sell to, we sell the very sort of expert practitioners, and 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, which I 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.

1:00:04And 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 example, so I think that's a big part of what we have to do, right? So like we, you know, 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?

1:00:35And also, like, the, you know, she's always crafting the language for whatever upcoming release that we're We're building and working with the teens and trying to figure out how to talk about it. And then when we go out and build the campaigns, build the 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.

1:01:05What I've seen you refer to this way of working as is a double triangle, which is I think and complement to the PM engineer designer. Talk about that and give us this visual with that looks like. Yeah, I think PMs, product managers, we often have a tough time trying to explain what is your job? It's a little bit of everything. And I think the job that I do, and that we see it as is you're taking the building side of the organization and the selling side of the organization and bring them together. That's you're taking all of the commercial motivations and goals of the company and making sure that what you build it actually solves for those goals.

1:01:48And you're sort of tempering that with what's possible and where the opportunities are to fashion 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 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 Jusky's whole thing about how PMs are should be doing marketing and so the way they change it or be a review, PM is also PMM and there's no more.

1:02:28They'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 good market. Yeah. And in fact, if you're leaving something on the table, right, in terms of like the kind of impact that you're having at your job, that's probably the thing that you're leaning on tape. You're probably already doing a good job of collaborating with engineering and design, right?

1:02:58It's probably the sort of sell side that you're kind of but there's an opportunity for you to have more impact. Just to make it even more concrete for PMs that are like, okay, I wanna do this. I wanna do it. I wanna do it. Linear's doing, I'm gonna get more sales. 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 just like here, try these things? I think originate the message that you sense your audience. Right? Like, there's a lot of things that marketing does which you're never going to necessarily touch.

1:03:30There's always like 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, you should understand the customer at a pretty deep level, probably deeper than any other group at the company because the kinds of requirements gather and discovery that you're doing. You're going to know the native language that your customer speaks a lot better and help your marketing team originally those words. Got it. So basically, we've really involved in the product marketing, the writing, the emails, the headlines, the website.

1:04:06Yeah, exactly. And so I know like the word product marketing is also so overloaded. They do some of the different things. And it's that sort of like content, you know, kind of creation piece that's 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 customers see. Okay. Okay, final area I want to spend a lot of time on is totally different. It's around getting a job. 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.

1:04:41I imagine linear is a similar boat. What advice can you share with folks that are looking for a job maybe struggling that work for you when you were looking for your next gig? Probably management is a kind of a unique role, right? Like 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 with their 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, right?

1:05:19So put on your discovery hat. And you 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, and then make a good case that you are the person to solve that problem, then hiring you becomes a binary choice between, do I hire the solution to my problem or do I hire someone else? And I think what ends up happening a lot is when we're in an interview process, you're just trying to put your best foot forward, trying to say that you're great at everything. You have very few weaknesses, maybe you try too hard, whatever it is.

1:06:01But everyone's going to say that. You're just like one of in people. And you want to make yourself a little bit of just you versus the field. You are the solution to a problem, and then everyone else is a role of the dice. So the way you're describing it is the company has a job to be done. Say it's drive growth of some feature. In this case, it's like for linear, just build and kill error, successful B2B product. I don't know. That's a broad one. Like usually you're not interviewing for a head of product role, so that's maybe two broad. So it's like, what is this PM role's 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?

1:06:42Yeah, 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 Mo that you reference. And I'm like, how should I approach it? He's like, just aptly 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 okay hours this quarter. How can someone help you achieve those?

1:07:13You could be that specific about it. They're like, oh, yeah, sure. I can tell you about the exact thing that I'm viewing 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. So like, what's the company goal of all that kind of stuff? And it's like, 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.

1:07:45A lot of people are interviewing 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 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 gonna 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 pretending you have the job, you pretend you actually have this job as part of the interview process.

1:08:19Oftentimes 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 gonna be so like wrong because you're like, I don't know, actually, no, I don't know 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 to solve these problems and show what you can do. Yeah, I mean, you're in the interview loop, right? These are people that you're gonna be working closely with. So start there, right? Do your discovery questions. And if there's an area that you think you wanna dig, you can ask, there's no harm asking, hey, can you put me in touch with an engineering manager who's working on the same problem?

1:08:54And if no one else is asking, again, you're gonna have an extra piece of feedback from that engine manager. So yeah, this guy asks really good questions and it seems like they're really with it. No one else is going to have that piece of it. So during the deep re -process. And just asking that question alone will show them how deeply we'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?

1:09:30I have a very specific point of view on deadlines. I don't know if that's a, that's too, I can't fire away. I think what often happens is people get depressed about deadlines. Here's the shift day and then you never make it. I don't know if you've had this feeling before. Absolutely. You weren't engineered before too. So it's just like, engineers is better. They're like, oh yeah, deadlines, they're complete fabrications. 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 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.

1:10:16So you know, my feeling on deadlines is don't have too many of them, right? And when you do, it's a P0. So the engineers working on it, they don't get the work on anything else. Like someone's, oh, I knew them for this. Like, 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 the ship, you want to be able to actually have a product that you can say yes to.

1:10:52It 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 to notice 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 just half broken. It's like, no, no, you want to get to a point where it works. It might not be the product that you want, but it is an actual real product that you can conceivably ship. But so you said that don't have too many deadlines, but when you do, make sure you everyone understands these are actual deadlines.

1:11:26When do you decide it's worth having a deadline? Is it like a marketing launch or the 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. And I think that's like the other thing that I think as builders, we can often look like launch dates and stuff like that. I was like, oh, who cares if it's a little bit later or we skipped this change log or whatever it is. And I think that that's really, I don't know, it makes me go crazy when I hear people say that and all honesty. You know, with marketing communication customers, you basically have a limited amount of opportunities to do so, right?

1:12:07A year is 365 days, there are 12 months, right, each of those months has about four weeks. like there's some rhythm where you get to have 50 -ish weeks to say something to your audience, you know, 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 like time travel back and say like, okay, actually, let's redo first quarter and like say this message that we wish we could have gotten down to the inside of the field. That is such a powerful point. I could see the sales marketing, go to market, element of your job coming out there.

1:12:43I imagine everyone that's in that field is like, yes, this is exactly right. Maybe just 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 mentioned is cutting scope. Another is just people spending the 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, do you risking in estimating versus just let's just do our best and then we'll cut and adjust.

1:13:17You 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, 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 the issue pool 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, right?

1:13:53You kind of have to do it from the beginning and commit to the process of going very fast, iterating early, way 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. Non, 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?

1:14:28I 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 it 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 it was the other day.

1:15:12I was at a cafe in my neighborhood and I saw a kid rip a handle off the door Like of the cafe he like pulled it so hard it came right off because it was a pushdoor, but it had a handle that looked like you could pull it. And it's like one of the canonicals that was in the book, because it had some doors or just streets. Yeah. Awesome. Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show? You really enjoyed. I've watched the Diplomat on Netflix, I think it was terrific. You know, it's really fun. Easy watch. It has like some like West Wing vibes if you were into that back in the day. Yeah.

1:15:45Have you seen the second season? 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 it got a little like spy thriller, I think. Yeah. Yeah. 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. There's a pen. Actually, I have one on my desk. It's like, it's called like the Sakura Micron. I don't know if you use these.

1:16:17It's like a fel -tip pen. It's really great, right? It was originally invented in Japan for artists, to draw like 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 looking, I was trying to buy more. And I found a package that said like Bible Study Kit. And 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 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.

1:16:50And it's just 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 keeper. And it was like official too. It's not something 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 live motto that you often come back to and find useful in work or in life. The correct amount is too much minus one. I think this ties into the try the extreme version of it, of a thing where, I don't know, stupid example, how much pizza do you want to eat?

1:17:28Five slices was too many. I feel bad. Four was probably the right number. If you want to find the right number, sometimes you just have to really shoot for the edge and 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 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.

1:18:02You worked at Everlane for a number of years and you shared the rough idea of a story around a shirt. Maybe our best seller that they have now and how you helped create a best selling women's shirt. Did you share that story? Yeah, so to be clear, I witnessed the creation. I don't think I had a direct hand in it, but... Yeah, so I saw this advertisement the other day on Instagram for it's called the Women's Box Cut T. 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's like, I remember when we created this thing. And it was because there was a batch of defective men's t -shirts.

1:18:49They all came in like an inch and a half too short. And so like, we couldn't sell them, right? You would have your belly button sticking out. Like, no one wants to wear that. And so what we did was we had to salvage the inventory. because we were a very small company and we had to make cash flow and we couldn't just damage it out. So the design team and the marketing team 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 a cropped boxy silhouette. And we did that.

1:19:20We're like, hopefully we can salvage this inventory and not have to take a ride down. It's sold out in a week. And I was 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. Like originally it was just white. Now there's like 20 colors. Oh man. I love how many industries you've worked in.

1:19:50Fashion, 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 going to have helped a lot of people build better products. Two final questions. We're going to focus finding a line 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 -new. It's THE and then my name. And if they have any feedback about linear, we're very happy to take it, especially for people who kind of I use it in their day to day.

1:20:24We 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. Non, thank you so much for being here. Yeah, of course, thankfully. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'sPodcast .com.

1:21:02See you in the next episode!