Karri Saarinen

It was almost never... It was always easier to work with a smaller team, very high quality people than with a very large team of more average people. It's almost like it's always faster and better output when you have a much more smaller team.

I think today it's almost a very basic thing now. Pretty much from the very beginning, you need pretty high level design for people to even pay attention or consider you seriously.

We always look for people that care about it. As a business, why we really care about it is that we see that cooperation only happens if people use the product and our product, which is supposed to help the cooperation, coordination. If there's friction or the experience isn't that great or there's little paper cuts, I think it gets really annoying for people to use.

One of the things I think that happens is when you build a team and you start creating these very specific roles for everything I think that often the PM can be the ones figuring things out and making decisions and guiding the team, but they're not the ones building the feature. They're not there looking at it the whole day like where does this button go or how does it work?

If you see that something is working really well, then it's almost like you should focus on doing that more until you hit some point. It's like, 'Okay, now we do have that category captured or handled as much as we want,' and we should expand to new area.

Why we do this is that we just seeing that it's a very good way to see for both of us, both for the company and the candidates to see how we work together.

We would invite only like... In the beginning, we maybe invited like 10 people a week. And eventually we increased those amounts. But the reason we did it that way was that we thought that if you just invite everyone at once or a lot of people at once, all of those people are going to probably hit the same problems in this kind of software that is very early stage.

Go slow to go fast. Sometimes people have a tendency to rushing into things and especially, I think, in startups, but other places too, you have this like... I think urgency is important, but then sometimes you have too much urgency and you are rushing things, and what happens is that you rushed it and now you need to come back to fix it.

What we try to do is you don't actually have to have that many levels, but people can just already, when they start, they can start owning more areas. And I think that can be much more also interesting, not to everyone, but I think interesting to many people.

I think very early on when it was the three of us I would be the one doing the broad strokes designs like this is how the UI works and this is how some of the things work. They were the ones that were like, 'Oh, there should be animation here and there should be this kind of thing here.' I think it's like that DNA I think comes from all of us.

I think these things happen when you give people more of the ownership of the project and also the space to do that and then you also have leadership or generally the company culture that values the quality or the craft.

Do we have the fit in the specific segments? And how strong that fit is. In the company's journey, the first year, we just focused on, 'Can we get the fit...' In the first two years, we focused on, 'Can we get the fit in the early stage startup segment?'

I think sometimes people use data a lot or too much because they're worrying or they're afraid that, will I make the wrong choice? And I'm using data to make the choice for me. But then you might still feel like this is not the right choice, but the data is telling me is the right choice and then turns out maybe it was the right choice or not.

The main thing is the whole company has to be with the customers or talk to them and then understand where the product might work well or where it might fall short.

I personally have this belief that productivity software should be, and especially company software should be opinionated. I think that what the productivity software is trying to do is make people productive. What happens is people start spending a lot of time figuring things out. Like, how does this feature work? You can use it in 10 different ways and then every team or everyone figures out the different way of doing it.

For us, I think it's... I think we are in the retention business. And the trust business that ideally we have a company starting use Linear very early on and then they stay with us forever. And I think the only way we can do that is we need to continuously deliver them good quality product and maintain that trust.

My design mantra is always design something for someone. It is very hard to design everything for everyone because you just end up with a very generalized solution. So then what we are trying to do with the opinionated solution is that that's the best solution or at the most optimized solution we think of.

There's always things that you're supposed to do or it sounds like a good idea to do. I always have this question, is this important to do now or is it important to maybe do later?

So the cycles is just a way to say that for the next week or the next two weeks or whatever timeframe, we are going to work on these things and these other things we think are the priority or the focus for this timeframe. And then the team can try to focus on those things.