Karri Saarinen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Awesome. So that's a good segue to another area I wanted to spend some time, which is the Linear Method. You espouse this way of building product that you call the Linear Method, which you publish online and willing to in the show notes. And I just want to ask a few questions around this way of building product. One is, you are big on this idea of building opinionated software. Can you talk about just what does that mean and then maybe give an example or two of how you actually have done that at Linear? So first with the Linear Method, why did we create it in the first place? Is we just believe that there is more of this modern ways of building software and thinking about it. And we wanted to share some of our thinking on it. And that's also, it relates to how we built Linear as well. So you might understand why we make some choices because this is the way we think about making these choices. So we are trying to share our thinking behind the product and also just like, here's the product and figure it out. So the opinionated piece, 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. And I think what productive means is you actually do something that matters for the company, which is, I don't know, build some new feature or fix something or design something. All of those things are eventually, they provide some kind of value for the customer. I think there is this ideas or notions in the world that flexible software is great. I'm like, I think it can be great sometimes. But 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. So our thinking is we like to provide this good default or good opinions. Like, this is how the feature works and this is how the workflow works. So you, as a user or as a team don't have to think about it and you can focus on the work you do. And the other thing is, 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. And then when you use it, hopefully you agree and you can feel that it's most optimized. So being opinionated, I think the value it provides people is you don't have to think too much or spend more time on the tool than you do on your actual work. And then another core element of the Linear Method is something you call cycles. I know Linear is all around this idea of creating cycles and working in cycles. Can you talk about what is a cycle and how it works at Linear?…

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