Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO)

My belief is that like any domain or industry, the more it matters, the more the design matters. What happens is like whenever there's like a new paradigm, I don't know, it's like the mobile or The web or something. iterations of those products existing there. They don't have to be like super well designed necessarily because they are the first. But then like as as you built the hundred, like thousand like different email clients, any email client now has to be like pretty good to be be even considered like reasonable like an email client. It's like that the bar is so high. So I think like

Today it's almost like a very basic thing now. Pretty much from the very beginning, you need like pretty high level design for people to even like pay attention or consider your seriously. Today, my guest is Kari Sarnan. Kari was the founding designer, Coinbase principal designer at Airbnb, co-founder of two previous startups. and most recently is the co founder and CEO of Linear. Which I am fairly confident is the fastest growing and most beloved issue tracking tool in the world, and something that a growing number of product teams are using to build their own product. Kari and his team are building their company and their product in a really unique way, with a huge focus on craft and quality, no A-B tests, no metric-space goals, instead a focus on taste and opinions.

Also, no durable cross-functional teams. Instead, teams assemble around a project and then disperse once it's done. Also, they have just one product manager as a head of product and that's it. In our conversation, Harry shares how he built a culture around quality and craft, how he makes trade-offs, and how he operationalizes quality and thoughtfulness. Where design can be a differentiator in competing against incumbents. We talk about something called the linear method. of building product, which is big on building opinionated software, working in consistent cycles, amongst other principles. We also get into Linear's unique hiring approach, which involves a paid work trial where candidates work alongside the team for a number of days, instead of just having an interview

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript, segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.