Nan Yu: evaluation

Transcript context

…I could see why people love Linear is it just makes them feel less bad less often. There's a lot of connection here. I know this idea of emotions and feeling bad is a core part of how you think about building product, looking for moments. People feel bad. Is there anything more you could share there to share how you think about this idea of emotional hooks, emotional moments, and how you decide what to build? So, to set the background of this, I've worked in very, very competitive industries. I worked at Everlane, which was a direct-to-consumer clothing brand. I worked in Mode, which is like BI tools and there's so many BI tools out there, and then obviously, Linear. We're project management. There's a lot of project management tools, and I think the more competitive your industry is, the more the low-hanging goal-oriented stuff is already picked because every PM from every one of these companies has been asking like, "Well, what's your goal? What is your job to be done," and all this kind of stuff. So, you have to look at things from an angle that other people might not have seen and for me, and for us, it's the angle of where are the emotional hooks that you're experiencing as you go through your work day, as you use our product, as you use competitors' products? I think it's probably underexplored because... I don't know. I feel like PMs and engineers, we're like very thinky people. We avoid the touchy-feely stuff. So, I think that's the opportunity. You can see where are you feeling bad throughout your day where you don't even know? You might think, "I hate Mondays." "Why do you hate Mondays?" "Well, on Mondays, I have to go out and gather a whole bunch of stuff to write this report that it's really annoying." "Oh, so if I gave you a button that made the report, would that help?" It's like, "Oh, yeah, then I might not hate Monday so much." So, I think Paul Graham has a word for this. He calls it schlep blindness, right? It's like I'm schlepping through life, and I'm just completely blind to it, and it's true. You have to have an outsider come in and see what the rhythm of your feelings are throughout the day, throughout the week, and you note the spots where you could really use a lot of improvement. Is there an example? I've shared a couple, but just where you've noticed this in someone using maybe a competitor or even Linear that you solved. I know you gave an example of the dates. I guess is there anything else?…

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