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, the first 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 build the 100, like, thousand, like, different email clients, any email client now has to be like pretty good to be, be even considered like reasona- 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 you seriously.

(instrumental music) Today my guest is Karri Saarinen. Karri was the founding designer at 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 products. Karri 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 metrics-based 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 the head of product, and that's it. In our conversation, Karri 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 principals. We also get into Linear's unique hiring approach, which involves a paid work trial where candidates work alongside a team for a number of days instead of just having an interview. Also, a glimpse into how Linear got their first 10 customers, found product market fit, and scaled their growth engine. There is so much gold in this episode. I am very excited for you to hear it. With that, I bring you Karri Saarinen after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Mercury, who I also happen to use for my business checking account. I've tried a lot of business banks, and there is nothing even close to the experience you get with Mercury. I moved cash over from another bank and it literally took less than half an hour to set up the account and wire money over at no cost. They kind of make you want to use the site more often, which I've never felt with another banking site. Mercury is banking engineered for the startup journey. A modern solution to help your company become the best version of itself. And Mercury isn't just a place to hold and send money. It's software built to help you scale with safety and stability, whether you're a team of two or a team of 1,000. Mercury also goes beyond banking to provide you with access to the foremost investors, operators, and tools. Visit mercury.com to join over 100,000 startups on Mercury, the powerful and intuitive way for ambitious companies to bank. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust, members FDIC. This episode is brought to you by Composer, the AI-powered trading platform now with retirement accounts. Algorithmic trading has historically been reserved for the hedge fund elite. Now with Composer, you can automate your trading with a library of over 1,000 strategies that are easy to understand and tweak using an AI assistant and visual editor. Composer is the first ever algorithmic trading platform where you don't need any coding experience, and includes a full range of trading indicators for you to get creative, and a Discord community of 2,500 traders to discuss your ideas with. Composer also has a powerful back tester to see the historical performance of your strategies, and you can then invest with a single click. Once you invest, Composer will automatically trade for you based on the logic of your strategy. With one billion dollars in trading volume and over one million trades executed, Composer already has many big time investors using the platform regularly. Head to composer.trade and use the code Lenny for an extra week, a free trial on your Composer membership. That's composer.trade. Karri, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.