I invited nickd to join our Linear instance yesterday, which reminded me that I had a slew of notes I wanted to publish on our own experience of migrating from GitHub Issues to Linear, and some reflections on it as a product now that we've been using it for a few months.
- One useful lens for understanding a product's positioning and strategy is to look at what its primitives are — the experiences and states that stand alone (and hopefully offer value) without any exogenous or endogenous connections. [1] For Linear, the core primitives are issue and projects; you cannot, for instance, tie issues to initiatives, nor can you create a document that doesn't tie back to a project or issue. It does not exactly take oracular powers to assume that this is not going to be the case for much longer; it is easy and seductive to imagine a world where documents and writing of a more artificial, less project-based nature live in Linear, simply because that's the most pleasant place to write, read, and collate them.
- Regardless of Linear's success as a brand, it's very very clear that Linear's success as a product is simple: it is really, really good, in a way that is almost uninteresting. Linear offers very few novel features [2] and instead invested a lot of time, energy, and polish in... just getting everything correct, and making it work extremely extremely fast. (This is, to be clear, whatever the opposite of a backhanded compliment is.)
- [REDACTED BUTTONDOWN ENGINEER] commented that using Linear "felt so much better than using GitHub Issues that it made [them] want to actually spend time making sure their issues were up to date", and I echo that sentiment tenfold. There aren't a lot of bold new workflows or insights that using Linear has unlocked, but it has changed "backlog management" from one of my least favorite chores due to the lag of GitHub Issues into something that I genuinely look forward to doing because it feels suddenly tactile and cybernetic.
- Relatedly, what all of these nascent "Linear for X" tools seem to get wrong is that the specific design language and branding is downstream (or even orthogonal) to what makes Linear feel so good, which is its obsession with ergonomics. The hyper-designed table views and Things-style progress-indicator chart icons are nice, but they belie the obsession with performance. [3]
In case anyone's reading from the Linear team, my (meager!) wishlist is as follows:
- Let me assign individual issues to initiatives
- Docs as a first-party primitive
- Let me mark certain views/issues as publicly visible (I know this one's niche!)
And, similarly, much of the nuance in "land-and-expand"-style product development, where you wriggle your way into a company with a single wedge and then hope that the company jams more of its state and headcount and process into your product, is offer facility and stair-step value in doing so. ↩︎
The label taxonomy thing, maybe? And "pivot tables in a sidebar"? ↩︎
And performance is much harder to ape. ↩︎
