Early-stage product development is no longer about validating novel ideas for new markets. It's about reaching an ever-higher quality bar to compete in crowded categories.
We need to rethink the concept of the MVP.
→
This is not a manifesto.
This is not a codex.
This is not a whitepaper.
This is not a secret master plan.
This is just a simple story.
A story about magic.
README
└─
We’re excited to share that we raised a $35M Series B led by
@Accel
, with participation from
@sequoia
and
@01Advisors
, to help Linear build the best-in-class project and issue tracking system
ͬͬͤ ͦͬͬͤ ͬͦͬͬͤ ͤͬͦͬͬͤ ͬͤͬͦͬͬͤ ͬͬͤͬͦͬͬͤ ͦͬͬͤͬͦͬͬͤ ͬͦͬͬͤͬͦͬͬͤ push back against stagnation
it's time for 𝙘𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙜𝙚
|⎸⎸ٳٰٰٰٰٰٰ⎸⎸⎹|ٳٰٰٰٰٰٰٰ|ٳٰٰٰٰٰٰٰٰٰٰ|⎸⎸⎹|⎸⎸⎹|ٳٰٰٰٰٰٰٰٰٰٰ|⎹|ٳٰٰٰٰٰٰٰ|ٳٰٰٰٰٰٰٰٰٰٰ|⎸⎸⎹|ٳٰٰٰٰٰٰٰ⎸⎸⎹|ٳٰٰٰٰٰٰٰٰٰٰ|⎸ٳٰٰٰٰٰٰٰ
New from our 2022 release:
📝 Notion Integration
Bring the magic of Linear to your
@NotionHQ
workspace with live previews of issues, projects, and views.
How do you identify the right people to hire?
At Linear, every hire goes through a work trial. In this new post, we share the thinking and the mechanics behind them.
→
Linear is not a better tool to build software.
It’s a better way to build software.
Now powering world-class product companies from inception to global stage.
Introducing the Linear 2022 release:
Built for scale
New this week:
📈 Project Updates
We are introducing a brand-new concept to Linear called Project Updates. These are short status reports that keep everyone informed about the progress and health of your projects.
New on our website:
→
Ingredients:
• A list of all Linear features
• All the reasons why Linear is the
tool of choice for high-impact
product teams
• A few magical little details
We’re now a team of 50, profitable, and are continuing to grow our team intentionally. If you’re interested in joining Linear, here are the key roles we’re hiring for:
- Head of Product Design
- Marketing Lead
- Experienced iOS & Android Engineers
Learn more:
We’re excited to introduce: Linear, the issue tracking tool you'll enjoy using. Our vision is to create more enjoyable and efficient way to manage software development.
Sign up for early access at:
Read our announcement on Medium
Linear’s @-mentions have received a full makeover: in addition to teammates, you can now also mention issues, projects, and documents.
Each mention is interactive. When you hover over it, you’ll see more details about the linked object. Mentioned issues will show the familiar
We recently introduced similar issues matching during issue creation and Triage, one of the first AI features in Linear.
In our latest blog post,
@tommoor
shares how we approached using LLM embeddings and vector databases to build the feature.
→
There are two types of work.
Features go into roadmaps, but where does the rest go?
We wrote a short guide that covers everything from zero-friction intake to effectively managing unplanned bug reports and requests.
→
New for open source teams:
Linear <> GitHub Issues Sync
› Manage your OSS issues from Linear
› Collaborate with GitHub contributors in synced comment threads
› Keep everything else in your Linear workspace private
We built Linear to show there's a way for software engineers to feel satisfaction with and control over their work. Of course, that starts with us and how we build products, so we shared how we think about building at Linear with
@lennysan
today
Roadmap timeline is almost here. Join our community chat May 27th for a live demo. We'll share how we built it and tips on how to use timeline with roadmap and projects. RSVP 👉
Just in time for summer:
Swimlanes for boards
Swimlanes bring a powerful new way to organize your projects and issues on the board view.
Group cards into rows based on different dimensions and instantly see how work is distributed across teams, projects, and other properties.
Some project plans are precise, but what about those that lie in the uncertain future?
With Project timeframes, you can now apply broad date ranges such as "April" or "Q2 2024" as the start and target dates of your projects.
The new Linear × Figma plugin enables designers and engineers to collaborate seamlessly without the need to switch tools or context.
Here is how it works ↓
Most Slack messages are requests:
- "I found a bug, can someone fix it?"
- "Can I get help with this SQL query?"
- "How do I get access to Google Analytics?"
With Linear Asks we are introducing a better way to create and manage these workplace requests.
Here is how it works ↓
Announcing:
Polishing Season 2022 ✨
Instead of new feature work, we are dedicating the rest of the year to quality work. Fixing bugs, improving performance, removing papercuts.
Join us live - and tell us what we should polish:
Last week, we announced a new concept in Linear called Project Milestones.
Milestones mark important points in a project's lifecycle and break the project into more granular stages.
Here's how to use them ↓
Following up on last week's incident, we are sharing a post mortem report with a full timeline of what happened, how we fixed it, and the changes we are making going forward.
Announcing our $4.2M seed funding led by
@sequoia
with participation from
@IndexVentures
and others.
This is a big milestone for our team and it will help us realize our mission to support companies to build great software.
1/ Epic changelog this week:
Announcing our $13M Series A led by
@Sequoia
. The next generation of startups builds with Linear and this funding helps us get to the next level. We're also celebrating a new release with Roadmap & OAuth2.
We are continuing our “How Linear uses Linear” series with a deep dive on how we run projects:
› Writing project specs
› How we use milestones
› Keeping others up to date on project progress
↓
New integration: Google Calendar
Sync your status in Linear with OOO events from your calendar. If someone assigns an issue to you while you are ✈️, 🏖️, or 🤒, they'll see that you are unavailable and for how long.
→
We are adding magic* to the
@SlackHQ
→ Linear workflow:
When you create a new issue from a Slack message, we now pre-populate the title with an auto-generated summary to make the process faster.
—
*Artificial intelligence. Does not contain real magic (but feels like it does).
From: Linear
To: Builders
Subject: Create issues via email
Generate a unique email address for your Linear team that automatically turns incoming messages into issues and adds them to your Triage inbox (or your team's default workflow status).
In
@lennysan
's recent newsletter on how we build product at Linear, we shared how we generate ideas as part of the early product planning process. Here’s our FigJam template, which you can use to organize your team's thoughts on what to build and improve.
Linear - 2021 Wrapped:
It's been an exciting and productive year for us here at Linear. We look back on a year of progress and momentum with dozens of new features, hundreds of fixes and improvements, and thousands of completed issues.
We’re often asked, “How do you use Linear at Linear?” so we’re kicking off a new series starting with a deep dive into our customer support workflows.
› How we manage bugs
› How we process feature requests
› A sneak peek of an upcoming new feature
Yesterday, we introduced custom project statuses to give product teams more flexibility in their project planning.
Here is how we use the feature to run projects at Linear ↓
We're expanding the team at
@linear_app
and looking for great people to join us and our mission to streamline the way software is built. We wrote about our philosophy and what are aiming for with Linear.
Let’s bring some magic back to software!
New for those who like to play status games:
Custom statuses for projects
Set custom project steps that share more context about where a project is in its lifecycle and what is needed to move it forward.
Polishing Season is still happening. Here are a few of the flaws and imperfections we ironed out in the last few days:
CARE-32 | Fixed alignment of history arrows
We updated the back and forward arrows at the top of the app. They previously felt *slightly* out of alignment.
New: Resolve comments ✓
Keep your discussions clean and organized by marking comment threads as resolved. This will collapse all replies and only highlight the decisions made.
See how it works in this week's changelog:
New in changelog: Triage responsibility
Triage is your team’s shared inbox for new issues in Linear. Many teams use it as a staging ground for accepting or rejecting issues from other teams or created by integrations. To better manage the queue, we added the ability to assign a
New from our 2022 release:
🏷️ Label Groups (coming soon)
Create groups of single-select labels to better organize and standardize issues across your workspace.
Label Groups are rolling out to all Linear workspaces in the coming days and weeks.
New changelog:
Jira Sync ♺
› Sync issues bi-directionally between Linear and Jira
› Mirror core issue attributes including labels and priority
› Collaborate across tools in synced comment threads
🔗:
Linear is the default tool of choice for ambitious startups to build and scale their products.
We are now making it even easier for teams to get started: Join the new Linear Startup Program through one of our partners and upgrade for free!
🔗:
Earlier today, Linear experienced an outage and data loss incident. We have restored service and are actively recovering lost data. Below is a status report we shared with affected customers.
Linear is growing the team!
We just gave a fresh coat of paint to tell you more about:
› The quest we are on (hint: it's about magic)
› How we work (hint: fully remote)
› Who we are looking for (hint: it might be you)
Over the last week Linear has suffered from several incidents that have affected availability. Below is a message from our cofounder
@artman
on how we’re addressing the situation.
2022.
A busy year is coming to an end.
Now it's time to take a step back and reflect on everything you fixed, built and shipped in the last 12 months.
Introducing ⏪ Rewind - a visual summary of your 2022 in Linear.
We recently spent a lot of time redesigning our settings view.
Settings are often seen as a design failure - at Linear, we think about them a little differently.
A few thoughts on settings from our designer
@Griveau
↓
🧵 Slack sync
Sync Slack threads to Linear issues so that the conversation in Slack is mirrored in a comment thread in Linear. Replies, screenshots, and files immediately sync and Linear posts updates to the thread when the issue is completed, canceled, or re-opened.
This week's changelog:
70+ improvements and fixes to our text editor
› Table of contents for documents
› Drag to re-arrange videos
› Drag & drop images from outside Linear
See the full list in our changelog:
✨ Similar issues
We use AI to surface possible duplicates and related issues when you create new issues, review issues in triage, and create issues from Intercom or Zendesk. You’ll see issues along with quick actions to turn the issue into a comment or mark it as duplicate.
New this week:
💡 Intelligent Help Center
(powered by ֍ OpenAI)
The in-app help center is now powered by AI. It's neither sentient nor does it maximize paperclips - but it answers any Linear-related question directly in the app.
Learn more:
We are rolling out updates to project updates:
New project updates now include a summary of changes that have occurred since the last update, so you can easily see how much the project has progressed. We also highlight other changes such as revised target dates.
New Git automation:
Ready for merge
You can now add issue status automations for GitHub pull requests that have passed checks and are ready to be merged. This new automation unlocks new workflows such as more streamlined QA processes.
🔗:
🗂️New this week: Project templates
Create projects from templates that let you standardize milestones, initial issues, and other details across teams or your workspace. It’s especially helpful for managing workflows that require a standard set of tasks.
New this week:
⏲️🚀 Improved time travel capabilities
Today, we are launching Issue Reminders and an upgraded date picker UI to help you better manage your time. They allow you to beam issues into the future, so you can focus on the here and now.
New this week:
🧵 Threaded Comments
You can now reply to comments directly...
└─ to start a side conversation
└─ or give feedback in context
...while leaving the main comment feed focused on the work at hand.
See all fixes and improvements:
Linear Insights
└ Contextual 📑
Insights come attached to every view across the app, illustrating whatever list of issues you are currently seeing.
No isolated dashboards. No context switching.
Just one streamlined workflow.
→
✨ New desktop app
The new desktop app includes a transparent sidebar for macOS, visual changes, and under-the-hood updates. To celebrate, we released a new icon with help from
@Gavmn
.
Aggregate, segment, and visualize data from any stream of work:
- Contextual for every view
- Directly actionable
- Shareable
Now available in early access on the Linear Plus plan: