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

(instrumental music plays) I think you see on the team at Linear 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.

I 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, w- 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 sales 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.

(intro music plays) 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 Nan Yu. This episode is brought to you by Cinch, the customer communications cloud. Here's the thing about digital customer communications. Whether you're sending marketing campaigns, verification codes, or account alerts, you need them to reach users reliably. That's where Cinch comes in. Over 150,000 businesses, including eight of the top 10 largest tech companies globally, use Cinch's API to build messaging, email, and calling into their products. And there's something big happening in messaging that product teams need to know about: rich communication services, or RCS. Think of RCS as SMS 2.0. Instead of getting texts from a random number, your users will see your verified company name and logo without needing to download anything new. It's a more secure and branded experience. Plus you get features like interactive carousels and suggested replies. And here's why this matters. US carriers are starting to adopt RCS. Cinch is already helping major brands send RCS messages around the world, and they're helping Lenny's Podcast listeners get registered first before the rush hits the US market. Learn more and get started at cinch.com/lenny. That's S-I-N-C-H dot com slash Lenny. This episode is brought to you by Paragon, the integration infrastructure for B2B SaaS companies. Is AI on your 2025 product roadmap? Whether you need to enable RAG with your users' external data like Google Drive files, Gong transcripts, or Jira tickets, or build AI agents that can automate work across your users' other tools, integrations are the foundation. But building all these integrations in-house will cost you years of engineering, time you don't have given the fast pace of AI. That's where Paragon's all-in-one integration platform comes in. Build scalable workflows to ingest all of your users' external data into your RAG pipelines and leverage Action Kit, their latest product, to instantly give your AI agents access to over 100 integrations and thousands of third-party actions with a single API call. Leading AI companies like AI21, You.com, 11X, and Coffee.ai are already shipping new integrations seven times faster with Paragon, keeping their engineers focused on core product development. Ready to accelerate your AI roadmap this year? Visit useparagon.com/lenny to get a free MVP of your next product integration. (instrumental music plays) Nan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.