Episode 233: How Linear Builds Tools Developers Actually Want with Nan Yu
Join Melissa Perri as she sits down with Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear, to explore how Linear is reshaping project management tools for software development. This episode delves into creating seamless user experiences, the evolving role of AI in product management, and the importance of aligning product strategy with company goals.
In this engaging conversation, Nan shares insights on how Linear is designed to enhance software development, the strategies for balancing feature requests with strategic development, and the role of AI in reducing administrative burdens for product managers. If you're looking to understand how to align product strategy with real-world customer needs while leveraging cutting-edge technology, this episode is a must-listen.
Don't miss out on this insightful discussion! Tune in to learn how to elevate your product management skills and strategies.
You’ll hear us talk about:
08:00 - Restoring the Joy in Software Development
Nan Yu explains how Linear aims to bring back the fun in software development by minimizing friction and enhancing user experience, allowing developers to focus on creating.
21:00 - Rethinking Estimation and Capacity
Discussing the challenges of scope and estimation in Agile environments, Nan provides insights on how Linear encourages milestone-based development rather than fixed scopes.
40:00 - AI's Role in Streamlining Workflows
Nan talks about the impact of AI on product management, highlighting how AI can take over routine tasks, allowing PMs to focus on strategic and customer-focused activities.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Nan Yu: We really focus on directness. We really encourage, in the app to write tasks in a way that just says what needs to be done, as opposed to doing like a roundabout, kind of indirect sort of user story and obliquely describing what's going on. So I think a lot of this stuff is designed to get you to your goal faster because the real, the real value, right? That people, bring to the table, when they're working in software development, is actually making the software or making the designs or, talking to customers or whatever it happens to be. That's the real value, your delivery. You're not here for data entry. You're not here to do administrative work or anything like that. We're trying to get that off of your plate.
[00:00:30] all the wrangling and stuff like that ends up falling right on PMs kind of by default. No one signed up for this job in order to like input a bunch of data into a issue tracker, right?
[00:00:38] No one dreams of that, right? We we wanna be talking to customers, understanding their needs, like kind of ei empathizing with them and all that kind of stuff. That's why we're doing this job because it's what we're good at and this is what we're here for. All that administrative stuff, just comes to us by default. So I think when people complain that PMs are just like, wrangling issues and doing data entry, it's because of that dynamic that the tools themselves are too clunky for the engineers to want to use or engage with. So they just disavow 'em all together and then it falls on us to, to have to fill in those blanks.
[00:01:04] PreRoll: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way.
[00:01:33] Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
[00:01:42] Melissa Perri: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Our special guest today is Nan Yu, the head of product at Linear, a cutting edge tool designed to enhance product planning and development with elegance and efficiency. We'll be talking about how Linear has managed to crack the code on project management for software development by focusing on great user experience as well as how product management is changing in the age of AI.
[00:02:04] Before we talk to non it's time for Dear Melissa. This is the part of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions. Go to dear melissa.com and let me know what they are.
[00:02:14] Hey, product people. I have some very exciting news. Our new mastering product strategy course is now live on Product Institute. I've been working on this course for years to help product leaders tackle one of the biggest challenges I see every day, creating product strategies that drive real business results.
[00:02:30] If you're ready to level up your strategy skills, head over to product institute.com and use code launch for $200 off at checkout.
[00:02:37] Here's this week's question.
Dear Melissa
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[00:02:38] Melissa Perri: Dear Melissa, my CEO read about OKRs and now wants the product team to set quarterly objectives. But our development cycles are longer and market feedback takes time to materialize.
[00:02:48] I feel like we're optimizing for the wrong metrics, just to show progress. How do you make goal setting frameworks actually work for product development instead of just creating busy work?
[00:02:56] So everybody gets really excited about OKRs, but a lot of people don't figure out how to deploy them before they start, everybody getting out there to make a bunch of goals and put 'em on a piece of paper. And that's just busy work, like you said. When you're talking about OKRs, what we're really trying to do is help us set goals to measure our strategy against, and they have to tie back to your strategic layers.
[00:03:17] So for instance, an OKR, objective and key result will fall at different time spans depending on what level of strategy you are tying it back to. So for instance, if you are setting this product initiative that might take a year or two years to reach, you have one OKR for that year to two years. It's something that you wanna achieve over that time, right?
[00:03:38] It's not something that you are going to be able to ship something and hit tomorrow. But if you're shipping things on a quarterly basis with a team, you can set an OKR to measure the results of what that is and see if it ties back to your strategy. What people do typically is they set OKRs independent of these strategy levels, and that's not correct.
[00:03:57] So you wanna think about what are our big company OKRs and our big company OKRs are things like I call strategic intents. You can write it as an OKR, it doesn't really matter. It's: what's my objective? What are the key results we wanna hit? Those usually take a very long time to manifest. They could be a year and a half to two years, sometimes three years as a strategic intent because they're very big pushes forward with our company.
[00:04:19] They could be to expand into new markets and you would measure that by the number of customers that you'd acquire in those markets, how much revenue you would actually put back into the company for those specific markets. That takes time to develop. Again, retention metrics might also be up here as well.
[00:04:35] Measuring retention takes time. What you wanna do on a product level, and if you're looking at a quarterly OKR, is looking at back at that company OKR and saying, what can my product contribute to this goal, in the next quarter? And that's going to form your product level OKR, which should be a leading indicator.
[00:04:53] So for example, if you're trying to increase retention, maybe you go out, you pull a bunch of data, you do a bunch of analysis, and you find out that some people who are retained more than others in this cohort are doing X, Y, and Z with your product. They have adopted a new feature or they engage with it more, and you want to put out there a change that encourages people to engage.
[00:05:14] Your OKR is going to be related to engagement. So if you ship that thing, in your change, you wanna measure your key results to see if it increased the engagement. Now, here's where the quarterly part gets very difficult. If you can't ship quarterly. Then you're not gonna be able to measure things on a quarterly basis, right?
[00:05:33] You're not gonna be able to tie back the changes that you made to an OKR on a quarterly basis. You'd just be making up new goals, but you wouldn't be shipping anything towards it. So you wanna tie your OKRs back to what those leading indicators are to show that you're reaching more value for the company and for your customers. And it has to be tied to what you're able to actually achieve. So if you can only release once a year, you're gonna have yearly OKRs.
[00:05:58] Why would you have more OKRs if you can't put more things out there? It should be tied to that. So that's the argument that you wanna go back there with, is that when we are looking at what we release, we do wanna set metrics around it to measure the results of the release. Those metrics though, should be leading indicators and they should be goals that help reach a bigger goal at a middle level of strategy.
[00:06:21] That's where your product initiatives come in. That's where the longer term product strategy is, and that should all roll up to a company level goal. Which is part of the company's strategy. And if you are missing those middle bands, you won't know how to set your goal. So that's where leaders have to come in and really make sure that they set up great product strategy so that you are able to break down your goals.
[00:06:40] And whether they're quarterly or they're weekly or they're monthly, it should be matching how fast you can ship and how fast you can actually achieve that. So I hope that helps. Thanks for your question. And again, if anybody has questions for me, go to dearmelissa.com, let me know what they are. Now let's talk to Nan.
[00:06:54] Welcome to the podcast. Nan, it's great to have you.
[00:06:56] Nan Yu: It's great to be here. Thanks, Melissa.
Getting into Linear
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[00:06:57] Melissa Perri: So linear has been taking, I feel like the whole development world by storm. I hear so many good things from people. Can you tell us a little bit about how you became the head of product at Linear and what your career journey was?
[00:07:09] Nan Yu: Yeah. I think my first touch with the the linear founders was when they were doing, some extensive, like research very early. I think it might even have been like pre-launch. I was running an engineering team back then, and like we got put in touch and they were interviewing me about our development process and all the different things that I had to deal with our, existing issue trackers and things like that.
[00:07:28] So I think that was the first time I talked to Kari and Joy and in a real way. Yeah, and we kept in touch throughout the years and at some point, I was, In the market to like look for something new. And I was doing some consulting work and I started working with these guys and, we hit it off and that's how we decided to get in cahoots.
[00:07:42] Melissa Perri: That's really cool and a little bit of trying before you, you jumped in. So, when you were working with them, you've been on this mission of trying to bring magic back to software. Can you tell us a little bit about how Linear got started and what that actually means at Linear?
[00:07:56] Nan Yu: Yeah I think, we are all of us like people who got into software because it was really fun. If you ask a lot of people on the team, Hey, what was your first experience in software? It wasn't doing something commercial. It wasn't like at a job. It was like. We were, dunno, hacking video games or building building maps in StarCraft or something like that, right?
[00:08:14] Where we had to first write a bunch of scripts and things. So we, we all got into it because we really enjoyed it. And then you look forward to Hey, I get to build software for a living. It's great. And then you hit a sort of like corporate situation and then you start having to, bump into all this weird friction. And all of these these tools that just seem like they're really not made for you, right? They're made for somebody, but somebody really wasn't thinking about, why you got into software in the first place and it just robs it of a lot of that, like magic and joy. That was the whole reason you got into it.
[00:08:42] So I, I think that's what we mean, right? Like building software is inherently fun. It's inherently interesting and we're just trying to get outta your way so that you can experience that.
[00:08:50] Melissa Perri: And one of what you're really concentrating on now is the development software, right? Like the whole process of how do we build products together. Can you tell us a little bit about what linear looks like today?
[00:09:00] Nan Yu: Yeah, so linear, if you look at it on first glance, it looks like project management software for specifically made right for software teams. And and we did this because we know that there's a lot of things that software developers want to take for granted.
[00:09:12] And there's other things where they want like a lot of control and we're making something that's really purpose built, to again, just make their to make their workflow very efficient and very enjoyable. So that's where we're aimed right now. We've added more features as times progressed to help. Different companies of different sizes adopt linear in a seamless way, but we never really take our eye off of the core workflow that individual kind of contributing engineers have to deal with.
[00:09:37] Melissa Perri: And for that, when you're looking at making it more magical for that software development process, what types of things did you really like hone in on? What frustrated you guys going into this, where you're like, this could be so much better.
[00:09:49] Nan Yu: Yeah, I think the two very related things are speed in every sense of the word, and and directness. Like speed is, everything from I engage with CTA I click on a button or something like that and it should just respond immediately. Just, you know, not have to wait a few hundred milliseconds, it should just respond. But also it's about getting to your goal faster so you don't have to traverse a whole bunch of screens or do stuff like, really indirectly. We really focus on directness so that even things like look, projects are called projects, Like it's, they're self-explanatory what they are. We really encourage, in the app to write like tasks in a way that just says what needs to be done, as opposed to doing like a roundabout, indirect sort of user story and obliquely describing what's going on.
[00:10:33] So I think a lot of this stuff is designed to get you to your goal faster because the real, the real value, right? That, that people, bring to the table when they're working in software development, is actually making the software or making the designs or, talking to customers or whatever it happens to be.
[00:10:48] That's the real value. Your delivery. You're not, here for data entry. You're not here to do administrative work or anything like that. Like we're trying to get that off of your plate.
[00:10:54] Melissa Perri: I feel like that's such a huge complaint too from the product management world, especially about Jira or some of these other tools. And a lot of, there's also a lot of developers I've heard lately, looking at product managers or let's say, people who are beginning to learn product management, right?
[00:11:09] Where they're going, wow. They're just like a Jira backlog person, that's all they're doing is they're filling in all these things, writing all this stuff, but it's not really about the work. When you think about that, what types of things are you putting in to, to help product managers in that flow as well? Or help, get people away from that stigma of we're just here to write stuff into this project tool and actually concentrate on the work.
[00:11:30] Nan Yu: I think a lot of times, PMs get saddled. With a lot of this work frankly, because the tools that are given to engineers are just too clunky for them to engage with. And if you talk to an engineer, like in, in a realistic setting, right? If you talk to an engineer and they say I spent all my time in cursor or VS code or whatever it is. I just didn't touch Jira, but then I shipped a bunch of code, they're gonna get a great performance review. it's gonna, their incentives are to like ship working code that customers are using. And so all the wrangling and stuff like that ends up falling right on PMs by default. Like, no one signed up for this job in order to like input a bunch of data into a issue tracker, right?
[00:12:07] That is not, no one dreams of that, right? We we wanna be, talking to customers, understanding their needs, like kind of ei empathizing with them and all that kind of stuff. That's why we're doing this job because it's what we're good at and this is what we're here for. All that administrative stuff, just comes to us by default. So I think when people complain that PMs are just like, wrangling issues and doing data entry, it's because of that dynamic that the tools themselves are too clunky for the engineers to want to use or engage with.
[00:12:31] So they just disavow 'em all together and then it falls on us to, to have to fill in those blanks.
[00:12:36] Melissa Perri: How do you see teams working differently that use linear compared to ones where we do have that product manager who's all over Jira and putting things in? What have you been able to unlock with the teams and help with their workflows?
[00:12:48] Nan Yu: I think the first thing, the comment that we get from engineers is like, oh, this is actually fun to use. I actually enjoy being here. This is a surprise to me. They'll say that, right? Because a lot of times, especially people with some experience, they were like, oh, all issue trackers are the same.
[00:12:59] They're all just to-do lists or whatever it is. They're, it doesn't make any difference to me. And then they use linear okay, Ashley, this is quite different. And and I think it's, the design goal that we have is look, this is, they all take notes somewhere. They all track, they all write things down, but no one relies purely on their memory to, to remember what to do and plan ahead and things like that.
[00:13:16] So we wanna be like, as fast as just writing it into a notes app or whatever it's right. So like, as long as it's that fast, then they're very happy to do it. They're happy that it's automatically shared and, and managed and structured. So those all become benefits.
[00:13:28] And what we see in the data when people transition from other tools into linear, is that the number of distinct issue creators goes up by a significant amount, like 60 to a 100 %, right? Like people actually
[00:13:39] Melissa Perri: Wow.
[00:13:39] Nan Yu: Are engaged with the tool. And this has like really good knock on effects, which just means that hey, if your engineers are engaged with a tool, that means your data quality is more robust. It's more complete. So that if you're gonna run some reporting or something off of it, then the, that reporting is gonna be more valuable, right? It's gonna be closer to the to the ground truth.
[00:13:54] Melissa Perri: Yeah. And that's important too because I feel like with that reporting and if people are actually putting what they need to into those systems. That also helps leaders, like yourself as well, be able to get some more transparency into what is actually happening, what's the work that's going out there?
[00:14:08] And we're not all running to quickly enter all this stuff in for a whole day and backtrack to where were we and what is it taking. So what kind of like insights do you feel like that helps you prepare for, that you can get out of here?
[00:14:20] Nan Yu: I think, there's a lot of things that you can get out of your issue tracking system. A big part of it is like, starting from a really granular level is just what are people, how, what have people been focusing on lately, right? And you combine that with some way to, scan a lot of this stuff. And summarize it, and then you end up with like pretty robust reporting, not just, counting, reporting and dashboards, but also even qualitative reporting about Hey, here's what the team's really been focusing on in the last two weeks. Like we, there's this problem that we described where hey, you're an ENG manager and you go on vacation for three weeks and you come back then you just like. Congratulations, you're, you just signed yourself up for a month of like gaining all
[00:14:53] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
Making Linear engaging for developers and PMs
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[00:14:54] Nan Yu: of the context that you just dumped right when you're going. And we really wanna help people bootstrap that context, within a day or two.
[00:15:00] Melissa Perri: And when you talk about like getting the developers in there to actually use it, are you doing that through like integrations? Is that like UX strategy? Like what do you feel like changes that behavioral part of them actually wanting to go in and actually engage with the app? How do you unlock that?
[00:15:15] Nan Yu: like fundamentally, it's mapping to their workflow. You gotta start there, which is like, what's the first thing that you have to do as a developer? What's the first annoying bit of friction that you have to deal with? It's, I gotta make a new branch. I need to know what to name it, and all that kinda stuff. so we wanna start from there. The first thing you do is every issue comes with, its, comes with a branch name. So then you use that branch name and if you use that branch name, then make a new branch. The moment you merge it, it like, feeds back into the system and we know that you completed the issue and all that kind of stuff, right?
[00:15:39] As long as we engage with you at the very start of your development process, we are automatically tracking quite, quite a bit of of progress and, the different stages of development as you go through, which alleviates developers of having to manually update that kinda stuff, right?
[00:15:53] We see people coming in from other, tracking systems and they're like I never keep my issues up to date. The status is always wrong. So at the end of the week, the PM goes in there and they like touch up everything. That shouldn't be anyone's job, right? We need to solve this altogether. So by solving this, I don't know what to call my branch right? All these downstream problems are also dealt with.
[00:16:11] Melissa Perri: Yeah, so I like that. So we are mapping and we're integrating into the developer's workflow, and we're not actually asking them for things that are beyond what they're normally doing.
[00:16:19] Nan Yu: Yeah. Yeah. In fact we're doing a lot of the cognitive work for them.
[00:16:23] Melissa Perri: Yeah, that's cool. So with a tool like this as well obviously you are, working with the software developers too. Your team is building a tool that they would be using. How do you really balance listening to customer feedback versus having an opinion about what you should build there?
[00:16:38] Nan Yu: I, I don't, I don't think about it as like balance necessarily. A part of the privilege of building for, your peers. In all honesty, right? People who are developing software like you, people who are PMs and engineers and designers, you get to have much more like real conversations with them about, about what actually happens on the ground. So what I'll, if you take a pm who is naive about this and I was naive about this when I kind of first started here. And you go into a customer call or something and then you like ask them about the process. You're expecting them. To come at you with these very highly opinionated workflows, right?
[00:17:13] Oh we have to do things this way. We've set up all these, automations or whatever it is, and we have this well-defined process. 'cause you read any kind of I don't know, PM blogs or whatever it is, it's like all about oh, here's step-by-step guide to how to do things. But then you ask them like, okay, tell me about what actually happened when you planned your last project? Or what actually happened when you planned your last quarter? And it's just oh, we got in a room and we decided what to do.
[00:17:33] And, you realize that a lot of that is, is like good in theory, but they don't have the tools to actually enforce it or to carry it out. A lot of what we get to do is, is we get to take the input about what people hope to do. Understand what they're actually doing in real life and accomplishing on the ground. And then try to help them marry those two things together as much as possible. So the constraints are not nearly as harsh as you would expect going into it. But you have to level with them as like a peer for them to open up about it.
[00:17:59] Melissa Perri: And then I guess, on that side too, it's your product managers and I feel like a lot of new product managers make this mistake. They listen to exactly like. What people want, right? And then they'll say, oh, it would be great if it could just do X, Y, and Z and I want you to build me this thing, rather than going, why? What's behind there? How do we actually uncover those motivations? So what do you do to, get your product managers into the mindset as well of teams that might work differently outside of, Linear, the company and see how they're doing product development too.
[00:18:29] Nan Yu: I think one of the things that we talk about internally a lot is we have to solve real problems for real people. And a real problem is not that someone has in the abstract. it's not like a class of problems, it's an actual specific instance of a problem. So when someone comes to us saying Hey we'd love it if you have feature X, we'll, dig in and we'll say okay tell me about the last moment in time where you really felt like the need for feature X. Was it last Tuesday? Was it this morning? Like, when was it? It's okay, like what was the situation like? Tell me about what actually happened in reality in that moment. Often you discover all sorts of interesting stuff, right? Like usually it's learn a lot more about their problem in those moments as much as you do, because they like didn't think of it.
[00:19:07] They kind of thought, ah if I had feature X, which just solve my problem, they move on, right? But then they go oh yeah, maybe I shouldn't, maybe I shouldn't even be doing this at all. It's like one, one question. Is this really worth it?
[00:19:15] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:19:16] Nan Yu: Or they unpack their problem. They understand their problem to be like more specific. So I'll give you a very specific example here, right? Which is, a lot of times people say: I really want to notify my marketing stakeholders when dates change. And that's good, right?
[00:19:28] Like we, we want people to be kept up to date about that. But if you dig into that further what that really is the dates were never certain to begin with, so they're just gonna be wobbling all over the place. So if you just take that at face value. And they use it exactly as they hope will happen, as the dates will just jump back and forth. All the place, people are gonna get spammed with notifications and they're gonna stop paying attention. That might be a useful feature, but that doesn't actually solve their problem.
[00:19:49] Their problem was they had to be overly specific when they were defining their dates in their system. Like the, the system has like date and then you have to be like, oh yeah, it's January 1st, but you didn't, you don't think it's January 1st. Like we've all been in those shoes before.
[00:20:02] We're a pm. We're like, look, it's gonna ship in the first quarter? I'm gonna try to ship it in January? So what date do I put? And then you put something in there, then everyone takes it like very literally, and all of a sudden you're like getting held accountable to that date, but you didn't mean it in the first place, right?
[00:20:15] So that's the real problem. The problem was not notification. So the feature we in a building was letting you specify dates at different levels of granularity. You can say first quarter, you can say January. You can say January 1st, like whatever. Whatever you actually know, you can specify at that level of certainty. And then all of a sudden you're not changing the dates a million times and people are actually getting communicated the right information. You're not like, you don't feel like you're lying to people every single time you write a date.
[00:20:37] Melissa Perri: How do you also help people understand maybe their capacity like in development? I feel like the, no, there's like this whole no estimates crowd, right? That comes from the agile side where it's like we will never tell you when it comes out. They don't think that we should give any granularity whatsoever.
[00:20:52] How do you balance that and what kind of insights and tools are you giving people to help understand. We can take on this much, or this is how we can plan and this is how we get to a reasonable estimate, of what we can accomplish and when we might be able to accomplish it.
[00:21:05] Nan Yu: Yeah. That's a great, that's a great question. It's good because there, reason it's a good question is because there's like a lot of implications and assumptions in it.
[00:21:12] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:21:12] Nan Yu: When people say what's the estimate for this thing? What they're doing is they're fixing scope. With a fixed scope, how much time is it gonna take? and I think the thing we encourage people to do, both within linear, the team, but also like with our customers, is to like, understand that it's fixed scopes, especially big fixed scopes, are almost certainly incorrect for reasons beyond estimates, right?
[00:21:32] You're not gonna build the right thing. If you are in certain industries with certain kind of like reporting and compliance requirements and stuff like that, like I can understand that, but like for the vast majority of software development, that's not how it works. How you wanna build it is milestone by milestone. You wanna build it more as a sort of investment appetite as opposed to like a fixed scope and then an estimation that you're trying to get Exactly perfect. So I think that's how, we think internally about capacity and and planning in that way. And also how we encourage our customers to do so. So, you know, when you have a project, rather than saying it's exactly gonna take these three people, starting from this day, ending on this day, it's, talk about it in terms of oh, we're gonna try to deliver this in Q4. Here's the investment appetite that we have with these three, contributors. And then here's some views to understand like how overloaded people are.
[00:22:18] Melissa Perri: Wait, I, this is like such a big topic for people too, I think, who are transitioning outta that project type mindset into product mindset. One of the things that I always hear, from leaders, and something I push back on too, I think from the like no estimates crowd, is that you do have business planning implications, right?
[00:22:35] So it's not like we could just be like, eh, when it comes out for like ever. Like this big thing that we're making a push for. I don't know if it's this year or next year and then a year after. How do you manage those communications as a head of product and like work between sales and your different executive team members to communicate the right level of information and the right expectations on timing and scope and all of those different things.
Capacity, estimation, and internal collaboration
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[00:22:58] Nan Yu: I think the the way that we manage it is we try to get to a plausibly shippable version of the app as soon as possible, right? Of the feature or whatever it is we're developing. often that happens very quickly. It delivers the core value or whatever it is, in a couple of weeks, right?
[00:23:13] If we have three months budgeted for something like that in the first month or the first couple of weeks, have something that more or less works. And then it's about how much refinement and how much, internal testing and beta testing do we want to do to accrete on top of this to get to a point where we wanna really do a big marketing push against it. So software is like one of these things where it's never done, right? No one ever, no one looks at me like that software is complete. It's, it'll never be touched again. So it's always a decision on whether or not you wanna enhance it further. So I think our job, right as PMs is to position and sequence the development in a way where we get to something that is plausibly, like something we can put in front of customers as early as we can. And then everything else is about, adding more value to that feature. So I describe it like, it's like you're painting a painting, right?
[00:23:58] And like it, look, if you get a professional painter to paint something like they'll kinda take a pass at it and you'll like, that looks great. I would buy that. And they're like no, I'm not done. They'll do another pass, they'll make the shading better. They'll do whatever it is, right? They'll increasingly give you more fidelity in the product that they're making.
[00:24:12] And at some point they're gonna, they're gonna feel satisfied, right? And then, somewhere you have to go to market, but you, we want to give people the ability to press that button whenever the business needs it.
[00:24:20] Melissa Perri: There's always that there's like a funny line that I remember everybody used to say there's V2 is like the biggest lie, right? Like going back and actually going and do that second pass. How do you ensure that your teams do go back and do that second pass? What kind of space and what kind of environment do you create to make sure we're not just shipping something and then never touching it again?
[00:24:40] Nan Yu: It's a whole collection of techniques, like the most important thing we do. Is we have escalating, rings of users that we deploy to. So by the time something goes to full production, it's been in, private beta. It's been in internal first, right? Where all of our internal users are using it on a daily basis, 'cause we use our own product. It's It's been in private beta with certain sort of like friendly companies and organizations that, we have very high bandwidth communication with and they'll give us like the real feedback. it's been in public beta where, there's like an opt-in beta group where you can join and then we'll just, it's 5% of the audience and they'll take it. And then it eventually makes its way to production.
[00:25:14] By the time it makes its way to product, it's like V6 already. It's not really about even getting the V2, it's about giving us built in, like escalations, right? Where we are gonna get more feedback and we're gonna digest it and then modify the product accordingly.
[00:25:26] Melissa Perri: And when it comes to product manager's role in that, you've said before like product management is a selling and a building function. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you mean by that?
[00:25:34] Nan Yu: Yeah. We talk about talking to customers a lot. And like talking to customers it's like that's a mechanical thing that you do, right? What's the point? The point is understand. You know how the customer views the world. ' cause at the end of the day, you're gonna have to like, bring something to market and give it to 'em in a way that, that they can receive, productively. So part of that is, does it fit into their life in the way that you hope in terms of the pure product sets. But also, can they onboard into it?
[00:25:59] Can they understand what you're giving them? Are you emphasizing the right things? When they encounter it, so they, they capture the value earlier and they don't dismiss it out of hand. All of those questions are important as does the thing ultimately, do what you want it to do? And I think that often we discount that aspect of it. Or we like say, that's up to marketing or PMM or something. Where I think that's really, it's like abdicating, like a really core part of of the responsibility right? To make the thing acceptable to customers.
[00:26:28] Melissa Perri: So when you are looking at your product managers and what you have there, you mentioned marketing, PMM, and I think this is a big topic in product management as well, like. When does product marketing come in? When does marketing come in? What does the product manager own versus what does PMM owned? What's the scope that you give your product managers? What do you encourage them to own, end to end, and where do you see the lines between those other functions?
[00:26:50] Nan Yu: So I don't see a clear handoff point between product management and PMM so in our org, PMM reports into me, right? So
[00:26:58] Melissa Perri: Okay.
[00:26:58] Nan Yu: PMM and product management are part of the same organization and so they're involved very early on, right? Maybe not quite at inception, certainly by the time the first beta goes out. Usually by the time, well before that. Um, and the first PMM deliverable is what is the messaging that we're gonna give to, private beta customers, right? These people who are, we can be really real, we can be a little bit technical, but we just need to say or two paragraphs about this feature in a way that like, will immediately help them understand what's going on. We don't need to sell them. That's what we don't need to do. We don't need to like, sell them on linear is great. They already believe that.
[00:27:33] What we need to do is have them understand and be able to get value from the feature on day one. So that's almost like the baby PMM deliverable because you, it's not a general audience. It's like really friendly and then we ramp up from there. So as the product develops and hits wider audiences, they have to figure out wider and wider messaging.
[00:27:49] But it, it starts very early, right? I think a lot of times you end up. In the situation where like PM goes like, okay, we're done. I'm gonna throw it over the wall and then PM's gonna get it. And they just don't know what to do. And it's like a big fire drill. Hopefully with us it's a much more gradual and natural integration.
[00:28:02] Melissa Perri: I feel like PMM now that product is becoming, bigger and bigger in many of these organizations. There's a lot of companies out there that maybe are not purely software native, or maybe they are, but they had a very strong product marketing function and now they've also got product and they're like trying to figure out.
[00:28:17] What does product marketing do in a world where product management right, is coming out and developing these features and going through the idea and all the things that we've just been talking about. What does your product marketing function do and what kind of value does it bring to the product managers? Like what's the kind of areas that they really concentrate on there?
[00:28:35] Nan Yu: I, I think, they do a few very specific things. I think one of the things that they really do in earnest is they are the shepherds that get it out into production.
[00:28:46] Melissa Perri: Mm-hmm.
[00:28:46] Nan Yu: They are the release managers, basically. Because the last leg of getting the stuff acceptable to audiences is making sure that all the communication is ready to go on, on launch day. And so that ends up being the bottleneck, but also the sort of enabler for the sort of final stage right of rolling things out. If you work backwards from that, there, there are very specific communication touchpoints that we have. One is to our internal go to market team, so there's written documentation. There's a sort of internal presentation that we give to our all of our internal go to market. That means sales success even customer service and and brand marketing to just internally, here's our internal launch. Here's what it is. I'm gonna demo everything pretty extensively to you, and then, tell you about all of the the messaging and the sort of use cases and stuff like that we've developed. And then in front of that if you go even further ahead is,
[00:29:35] you know beta messaging. What do we say to our beta customers and what do we learn from them, right? In response. So I think all of those things are the responsibility of PMM. And, each one of those moments is a partnership with product management, right?
[00:29:46] It's not like there's a clean handoff where p PMs release it from their ownership, right? It's, you're doing these things together the whole time. And then the sort of more like communicative aspects of it are a PMM role.
AI’s role in streamlining PM workflows
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[00:29:58] Melissa Perri: Great. And when we're talking about product management and the future of it, these different roles, AI always plays a really big piece in it. I'm curious, what are you guys considering when it comes to AI? In the way that we do our work for product development. And how do you also see it shaping product management in the future?
[00:30:15] Nan Yu: I I can tell you what I hope, right? What we're building towards. Which is, if you think about. The list of activities that a PM does, day to day. We already talked about like all the silly data entry that we are, we're asked to do, but a lot of the work ends up being shaped like you have to try very hard and be very diligent. And it involves reading a bunch of stuff then honing it down to. Some smaller surface and then expressing it, right? So it's hey I read a bunch of customer feedback and I like wrote this, wrote this sort of report on like the requirements or what we need to do or, we I took a bunch of ideas internally and I crafted the PRD out of it. Or even we like had a whole bunch of meetings and discussions and I made takeaways and next actions and and updated the PRD with some decisions that we made. All of those, things that follow that pattern, I hope that AI is gonna take off our hands, right? That we can be as much consumers like we can be the people who are in those discussions, right?
[00:31:09] And being very active and in the moment and present. we can be the consumers of the outcomes as much as anything. And we can be the editors at the end of it. I think that's, that is how I hope AI is gonna transform our jobs, personally so that we can actually focus right on the, on what we came here to do, which is as much as possible, be on the ground with customers, understand their needs asking the right questions and working through people's problems with them so that like we can generate all of the right context for like subsequent decision making.
[00:31:37] Melissa Perri: And when you think about linear and like the product itself, how are you helping people do that?
[00:31:42] Nan Yu: Yeah, so we're, what we're trying to do, like in a very mechanical sense is to almost literally look at a set of responsibilities that, PMs are asked to do, and then like carving out the individual ones and saying what can we build in order to make this a lot easier? Or to completely automate it. And then, and what's left right is the stuff that we wanna do. So the first, our first slice of this that we did was like, I'm sure the PMs out there have had this experience before, which is Hey, look, there's a bunch of feature requests that come in. They come in through this triage queue if you've set one up maybe in linear, maybe elsewhere. And you literally have to just read a whole bunch of feature requests and decide what to do about it. And those decisions are all sorts of, there's all sorts of actions you could take. Oh, actually this is a bug, so I better file it over to this engineering team. Or no, this is, this goes to this other PM because it's like the service that they work on. Or this is a duplicate of something that we talked about last week. And then now you have to go on a quest to find it. And if you're lucky, you remember that, if not, then you're probably just gonna have a bunch of duplicates in there. Or it's like very related. Tells me something more about something we've already decided to do, right?
[00:32:47] So I should probably link it together. So all of those. Little, kind of things that you do, add value to this new information that's coming to the system. And it's like on, it's often on us to do this. And if we're really diligent, we're able to do this with some level of reliability. But scaling this up is extremely hard, right? Doing it the same way across multiple teams. It's like you're gonna get very unreliable results.
[00:33:08] So our first goal is is to take this specific activity off of your hands. what you can do is you can see instead of having to deal with every single one of these things individually, you can see, Hey, what's been coming in for the last, for the last week? Let's see what's come down the pike and where it's been routed to and who's been doing it and things like that. And then obviously you can still dig into the individual things if you want, but hopefully you're able to again, be on the receiving end of the report rather than having to build it yourself.
[00:33:32] Melissa Perri: When I think about linear too, and you guys play in this kind of crowded space, right? We've got our JIRAs out there, we've got all these project management tools. We got some things that have been so entrenched in these companies for so long. What have you seen help people make the shift over to this?
[00:33:49] Because I can imagine there's a lot of product managers and developers probably listening to this going, oh, it'd be great if I didn't have to go do all of these things in there, but my whole company's on this. Or, we were so entrenched in these different ways of working. We just spent, a million dollars setting up Jira.
[00:34:03] Like I can't go get them to pull that all out now 'cause we wanna do it. Like what? What do you think helps bring people out of that mentality of like we're tracked with our current systems and helps them see that we can migrate or we can get into different things like this if it will help.
[00:34:18] Nan Yu: I think there, there's a lot of different reasons people feel stuck or they feel excited to make the change. Usually it takes some inflection point, right? Where Hey, like we're gonna about to begin a new quarter. Let's do our new planning in this new system instead. And and I think people do have a lot of some cost feeling where they're like, Hey, we've invested a lot to do all the settings for our old system. And it feels painful to let that go. But I also think that people realize on the ground that if the engagement is poor across their team, that all of those settings and all of the reporting that you set up and automation, stuff like that, they don't really help anybody. And I think it takes, realization, right?
[00:34:58] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:34:58] Nan Yu: That's what's happening. Which is, it's a, larger your organization is the more change management there is. So it's it can be a little bit difficult, certainly. But also, with, part of our goal with a lot of the sort of AI driven stuff, like the stuff I just described, is to help you get value on day one, right?
[00:35:15] Because often what people feel is look, if I make this big change, maybe it'll pay back in like a quarter or two, or something like that. So I gotta really balance, how much investment it takes to migrate everybody off versus the payback period. But one of the things that we do is like, look, you have all of this tribal knowledge basically, right? Embedded in all of the issues and stuff that you've done in the past. We're happy to import that for you. And then every single time a new issue comes in, we're using who worked on what and what team worked on it, and all this kinda stuff to help you like actually take any of that incremental new information and route it to the right place. So we can take a lot of that stuff off your hands almost immediately using some of the newer AI features that we've developed.
[00:35:50] Melissa Perri: You're also making me think about especially when it comes to product operations. This is like a huge part that's near and dear to my heart. As like leaders and as product ops people, we try to get the information out of these systems so we get a good picture of what's going on, but it's also to come back and help us try to link strategy to execution.
Linking strategy to execution and future trends
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[00:36:07] Melissa Perri: So how are you using linear and what other things would you need like around it to be able to say, Hey, I'm setting our strategic goals right for my product management team. How do I keep on track of that and how do I make sure that we're moving towards them well.
[00:36:22] Nan Yu: I think within linear, we want to have end-to-end ability to express what we're trying to do. I think like ultimately that's the entire point of a distributed project management system. Is for someone to be able to like, look at the system and say: what are we trying to do? What are we even trying to do? Because if it's just a, like there needs to be structure to it. If it can't just be a big flat list, 'cause then you don't
[00:36:42] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:36:43] Nan Yu: actually trying to do. So we have a lot of structures in there like initiatives and projects and and like timelines and stuff like that to let people express their intent. then on the other flip side of it, to report back out. How's it going? Are we actually doing the things we set out to do? Like where is the effort being concentrated? Is it concentrated on the strategy that we defined here, in these structures? Or is it, concentrated elsewhere? So in order to like have reliable reporting like that, you have to have good engagement across the board, right? So all of these things are interlinked, right? So that's why the most important thing for us to do is to make sure that the on the ground engagement by individual engineers is extremely high. The data quality is very good, and then once you have that, then you get the privilege of actually reporting out what's going on.
[00:37:22] Melissa Perri: I love that you say that too. 'cause that was always my biggest struggle, like when we would go into companies and set up product operations. Our information is only good as the data that we have in these tools. So if people aren't using the tools and they're not using it correctly, I can't actually pull all that information out and give the executive view or the progress view of where we are.
[00:37:39] And I think that's such an overlooked thing when it comes to tooling and when it comes to what we're looking at, it's not just about having a tool there, it's about having a tool that somebody uses.
[00:37:49] Nan Yu: Yeah, exactly.
[00:37:50] Melissa Perri: And you keep coming back to we get the developers in there to interact with it. It sounds like that's a little bit like your North Star metric. Is that something that you guys are always continuously monitoring and looking at, like the engagement across it by different people?
[00:38:04] Nan Yu: Yeah, I think that, that's your core value, right? Everything that we do is relative, like with respect to that value. A lot of times people talk about going up market. And you can get, it can get very easy to be like distracted by saying oh, we have to serve enterprise needs and stuff like that. Like the way that we think about going out market is we get to be in the hands of more individual developers if we enter into a larger organization. What what can we do right to add this type of value to more individuals? Which means that we can't do anything that gets in their way. We can't be like, well, because it's a big company, we have to do all these extra things that makes life more difficult for them.
[00:38:35] Like, No, then we're, then we're actually not even doing the thing we set out to do, which is get this exact value into more hands.
[00:38:41] Melissa Perri: I love the focus too, like, When you explain like your mission here. I could tell it's just ridiculously focused, which is very hard to find sometimes in a lot of companies. And what is it like, across your executive team to build that focus, to reinforce that mission? What do you do to make sure that everybody knows what we're driving towards and that we are all aligned as executives as well?
[00:39:00] Nan Yu: I think, with the, say like the nice part about working at Linear, one of the real benefits is we use our product so constantly at every single level of the company, that it doesn't have to necessarily come fully from the executives. Like the engineers will riot if we do anything that makes their life harder. And that's good, right? It's like a control that we get to have and keep ourselves honest about it. We obviously, it's like top of mind for us as well, but we know that, a lot of the little details and things like that. Everybody who's developing the product is constantly paying attention to.
[00:39:28] Melissa Perri: When you are looking at the landscape too, of, product management, development, all of these things, we talked a little bit about AI, but over the next two to three years. What do you think is going to change and what kind of trends are you looking forward to?
[00:39:40] Nan Yu: Yeah, I think that reviewing work is gonna be a really big deal. And I think that often, we think about it as the last step of, you know, and then people maybe don't even take it seriously. They just like rubber stamp it, and let it through.
[00:39:51] But if you think about kind of work, especially like development work as a system of abilities and bottlenecks, right? The bottleneck that really got released is number of simultaneous things that you can do at once. We have AI agents that you can deploy inside of linear, like today, like coding agents. Where you can go into your backlog, command a, select everything in your backlog and say just do 'em right. Is it gonna be good? Is it gonna be reliable? Is it gonna integrate well with your code? I don't know yet, right? But you can tell it to write very plausible code and make a poll request against every single thing in your backlog. And then what you're left with is a ton of review work. So I think that's gonna be the big the big sort of change right in, in software development is like a much bigger emphasis on evaluation and and review and certification and things like that.
[00:40:35] Melissa Perri: Yeah, that, that's a really great one to bring up there. And I don't see everybody looking at evaluation yet. I know those types of things are still coming up and becoming more of the talk around AI too.
Advice to younger self
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[00:40:45] Melissa Perri: And one last question for you Nan, when you go back and look at your career, what advice would you give to your younger self?
[00:40:52] Nan Yu: Gosh, it's, it's always hard. It's hard to look at that stuff in hindsight because it's like you're just swimming in it, at this point. I think, when I was younger, I read a lot. I read a lot about like craft and what a PM's all about and things like that.
[00:41:02] And I think you can really only get so far doing that. Like the moments where I learned the most was when I sat down with someone who's done it for a while. I'm like, just tell me about everything you're doing while you're doing it. And I think that, those moments, you cut through the posturing and all of the, what people hope is, true to, to what actually is happening on the ground. And it really does simplify a lot of things. So I think that's probably it. I'd probably read fewer things about how to PM and just go annoy a seasoned PM and see how they do their job.
[00:41:31] Melissa Perri: I think that's great advice and I know so many people are afraid of just going to ask people like, how are you doing this? Show me what's going on. But I know in so many companies, people are really happy to share that. They're really happy to have someone learn from them.
[00:41:42] Nan Yu: Yeah, and I think like a lot of people, like they maybe not even vocalize this stuff. Like it's stuff that they've developed over time and it's just layered on as they've learned things and they've never explained something to somebody else, and then walked people through how they do things. So yeah I wish I'd done that a little bit more and a little bit earlier.
[00:41:56] Melissa Perri: That's super valuable advice for people out there listening. Nan, thank you so much for being on the podcast. If people wanna learn more about you or linear, where can they go?
[00:42:03] Nan Yu: You can follow me on X. I'm the Nan Yu, T-H-E-N-A-N-Y-U. That's probably the best way to see stuff I write and also interact with me if you wanna send me a message or something.
[00:42:13] Melissa Perri: Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us Nan, and thank you to our listeners of the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another amazing guest. Make sure you go to dear melissa.com and let me know any questions you have for me. In the meantime, I answer them every single episode. We will see you next time.