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

I think you see in the team at Liniar that a lot of people don't see, which is that there's not actually a trade-off between speed and quality. People talk about this as if there were a trade off because when they think about speed, the thing they over index on is like rushing or being sloppy. What they should be indexing on is being really competent. If you look at people who are like at the the pinnacle of their craft, you can basically tell how good the output is gonna be of their work product by How fast they're going. What does speed look like when you say it can be done quickly and high quality? What it really looks like is, you know, you have some rough time budget for how long you think something's gonna take. By the time 10% of it has passed, after week one, you have something that works, that tests some kind of key hypothesis internally. Imagine a criticism you all get. Over time, you'll 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 kinda 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 BDB SaaS product out there today.

You rarely see the kind of love that people have for Linear for any enterprise B2B SAS 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.

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.