Lenny Distilled
Strategy → Vision & Mission
Opinionated software is basically software platforms that essentially have either best practices or maybe some rules integrated into the system. You have systems that you can customize any which way and however you want and then you have other systems that enforce a certain way of behaving or doing work.
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.
You need something that actually a lot of people are going to go, 'Why are you taking this principle? This seems wrong to me.' So you need something that people can disagree with.
You can't retrofit collaboration. You have to be collaboration-first.
There's something controversial about this idea that everyone can see what you're doing, or that multiple designers can be in the file at the same time. We like to say that one of the first responses we saw to Figma was, if this is the future of design, I'm quitting... that is signal that you're part of this revolution and you're trying to change something. And when it equips your customers or user base with that, then I think that's something that they can really get behind and champion.
I think there's two different approaches. Either find a process that just doesn't have technology that is a best practice or growing best practice. I think the same thing happened in DevOps with many different tools. And then Greenhouse, which is more like, what are companies missing? How can they do it better? How can we train them and teach them a better way? And then by the way, our software helps you do that.
You don't want to make a statement here. You want to start a story.
Your brand name, nothing's going to be used more often or for longer than that name. Design will change, messaging will change, products will change, but that name is there.
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.
There are a number of principles that I think when we first shared them with people at the company seemed maybe a little bit crazy. But I think they are the reason the product works, and I think they've been very important, and we do. We come back to them regularly, today, all the time.
This thing is going to be the voice of the people. It's going to represent the voice of people. It's not going to represent the company's voice. So it is not a tech company deciding what shows. It is the people deciding what shows.
If there's a problem with a note that's so bad, you want to do something about it's a problem with the system. We need to redesign the system to be showing good notes.
For a lot of people, the brand should be somewhat invisible so that the thing itself becomes the star. If we think about the experiences that we have using products, sometimes the delight is the fact that nothing is getting in your way as you're using that product.