Nan Yu: evaluation

Transcript context

…I imagine a criticism you all get. People are like, "Yes, Linear is so great, so beautiful, so much better than what's been out there for decades," but over time you'll probably become a bloated piece of software as well. That's just the fate of enterprise software. You have to check all these checkboxes. IT teams need all these features. So, there's always this like, "Oh, yeah, sure, you guys can operate this way for now. You have an amazing product for now, but it'll get ugly and bloated." How do you think about avoiding that? I know it's something you spent a lot of time thinking about. Maybe give us a glimpse into some of the conversations you have internally when there's these feature requests like, "Oh, I need single sign-on with this thing and this button here." How do you think about what to add, what not to add, and how to add these features to not make it bloated? This question actually comes to us a lot from candidates that are interviewing with us. When you go like, "Hey, do you have any questions for us? " This is the question that we're going to get. So, we hear it quite a lot, and it's very sensible for them to ask it because they see history being littered with the corpses of startups trying to compete in this space and not making it, and I think when we examine this problem, we look at, "Well, what kind of feature requests can we debate and what kind of feature requests do we absolutely have to say no to? " And the stuff that we absolutely have to say no to is also the exact kind of thing that leads to this bloatedness that makes ICs hate their lives, and it's very specific. It's customization features requested by middle managers in order to make reporting a little bit easier at the cost of making IC workflows worse. It's like if it fits that description, we're just saying, "No." There's no debate because we've already thought about it and this is the thing that we can't take a single step down this path. So, I think that's honestly one of the core promises of Linear is that we will not make this particular trade-off. So, when you see people saying like, "Wow, Linear is so much faster. It's so much easier to use and it makes my work so much more enjoyable." This is the reason because we have not taken a single step in this direction. It's very easy for a PM to say yes to this kind of request because often they're talking with buyers. Any kind of B2B type of space, they're talking with whoever the gatekeeper is and sales is putting pressure on them, and they're saying like, "Hey, we really want this one feature. It's going to make our reporting nicer." So, the director's going to be really excited by this, and we'll definitely make a buying decision based off of this, and we have to convince them that this is a false trade-off. The whole premise is wrong because the moment you start going down this path, and you make the IC user experience worse, they're just going to disengage. No one has to do this. If I'm an engineer, I get paid to write code. My performance review is based on my code contribution. It's not based on like, "Did I fill in all the tickets right?" So, I'm just not going to do that part, or I'm going to do it very sporadically, and then I'm going to just focus on my actual job. And then all your reporting is wrong because all the data is wrong, and it's sparse, and you get situations where people will... They'll say like, "Well, here's a dropdown field that someone put in here that's required." There's nine choices. I don't know what any of them meet, so I'm just going to pick one at random. I'm still going to pick the first one. Also, I'm going to pray that my boss is not actually using this data to do any kind of reporting and that has consequence because the data can't possibly be correct. still going to pick the first one. Also, I'm going to pray that my boss is not actually using this data to do any kind of reporting and that has consequence because the data can't possibly be correct. So, I think for us, it's a very easy decision when it comes to that particular category of feature request.…

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