YouSaid · the spoken record

Karri Saarinen

lines on the record: 112
first: 2023-10-08
most recent: 2023-10-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Symbol like a marketing hire is like we think about yeah we do need the marketing skill sets but then we also want to see that this person also maybe it's a good storyteller or like they have like this like kind of appreciation for for writing or stories or like they have a taste of what's what's like interesting and what's not so i think like with or like when we hire like operations person we also like to see that they they maybe like have understanding on hr and maybe it's not their role but they they understand it and what happens is like when you have these people that are Little bit more than their title, it's like the companies, I think, much more easier to manage because it's like people can pick up things more easily or they can like. Work together more useful because everyone has more like a share”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, I would say with every role, we often talk about there needs to be some taste or some understanding of how things are done or what's the people have more like a broader perspective than whatever their role is. So we talked about the engineering before that they do need to do some of this BM type of stuff. And so what we look for in them is that they have some of this skill set or product thinking or they can articulate why some choices are better than some others or like in their past, did they disagree with some of the company's choices or the team's choices or like so we want to have this obviously they need to be good developers but also like do they have this like a product sensibility or or do they have like a judgment around that and this goes similar to like like”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Highlight a couple people, and then the second year we hired a few more. We never more than doubled in a year, and that's kind of like been our guideline that we shouldn't more than double. And this might be something we change in the future that we actually might do less than that. But when we look into hiring, it's a couple things. One is also that it obviously depends on the role”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things we all of us founders kind of saw in this high growth company is that sometimes the high growth is, especially on the employee side, is not that great. It can create a lot of chaos or just messiness or just generally in my past and working in companies, it's almost never, it was always easier to work with a smaller team, very high quality people than with a very large team of like more average people. It's like almost like it's always faster and better output when you have much more smaller team. So that was kind of like the thing with Linear 2 is like we just believe that you can actually build better with less people than you can with more people. So that's like the basic belief we have. So then when it goes to hiring, we've been like taking very kind of like slow steps on it that like in the almost like the first year we didn't hire anyone. Then like the second year we”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is always ideas people have, and it's a good thing, and it's like people have ideas, but then it might be like, yeah, let's make this t-shirt. So let's make this thing. And then we're like, well, does it help the customers? Does it help the product? Like, this sounds like a side quest to me. And basically it means we shouldn't do it. Like this doesn't procrast the main quest line, which is like building this product and making it awesome for these customers. So it's similar to me. It's like I operate this way personally too that I think about like, is this important for the main quest line in building this company for me? Or is this something that I can ignore for now or something I can do later and it makes more sense then?”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is this really important thing to do? There's always like, yeah, like you could get SOC2, like security kind of certificate. And we know that eventually we need to get it, but we don't need it today. So we just say no to that. And if customer asks for it, someone say, we don't have it, and we will have it one day, but not now and see. And a lot of times people are like, okay, that's fine. And then internally, we also talk about this like, you knowing RPG games, you have the main quest lines and then you have the side quest lines. And we often talk about the companies, like avoid the side quests.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Third, when you said exercise, or And the exercise is that it's important for you to be healthy Or just not to like burn yourself out. So I think there is like it was like a balance Advice to that So I'm doing those three things. So I think the thinking there is like, I think we often as a company also talk about this and like very early on. And I use this the same way. And I think the company can use it the same way. It's like, I think there's always things that you're supposed to do or it sounds like a good idea to do. And it could be like, yeah, come to this podcast. And I actually think before it wasn't, or like I was not this question, it's like, is this important to do now? Or is it important to maybe do later? So I think like, for example, question on this podcast is like, I didn't feel like it was important to do it earlier because we weren't at the stage or a scale or something that it, I think, would be like as interesting or something. So I think it was a better timing to do it later. Similarly, when we built the product, initially we were just very focused on like.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't think there's any complicated processes. And so I think one of the things I was in YC in 2012 and one of the things, the main thing they say there is like what you should be focusing on when you build a startup is like talk to customers, build the product exercise. And if you find yourself doing something else, then those three things, it's probably like the wrong thing to do.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Otherwise, like mistreat them. And I think some businesses are much more transactional where it's like, yeah, we just need to make this e-commerce sale. And then once it's done, like we don't care what happens. So in our case, it's more like we really need to build this relationship over time. And then that's why I think some of the choices we make are also kind of like more about respecting the customer versus we're just wanting to drive the revenue of the company.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“End for sure, and then, like, if you look at successful companies and Amazon is very different than Apple and how they operate. And I think both of them are successful, but not in the same way. So I think it's, again, it's like, yeah, it's a decision you make as a company or as a founder, like what kind of company you want to build. I do think there is some aspects of the domain that you're in. What is that domain and the problem space require from that company? For us, I think it's like we are in the, I think we are in the retention business. It's like, and the trust business kind of that ideally we have a company starting use Linaire very early on and then they stay with us forever. And I think the only way we can do that is like we need to continuously kind of deliver them good quality product and like kind of maintain that trust that we are, that we don't like fail them or somehow.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just have to kind of believe in it. I think sometimes people use data a lot or too much because dates, they're worrying or they're afraid that will I make a wrong choice? And like I'm using data to make the choice for me. But then you might still feel like this is not the right choice, but the data is telling me it's the right choice. And then turns out maybe it was the right choice or not, but it's more like, again, like a practice thing, like you need to be, I think the company and you need to be okay that like sometimes we make mistakes and like we made the wrong choice and then we just can fix it. But at least we made that choice and the data didn't make that choice for us.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you know your customers or the product, it's a very different way you can talk about it versus if you don't have any idea. I think if you don't have any idea, you probably don't even know what to say. So I think it's like kind of apparently if people have that. And it's not like every project like we need, like everyone to have this understanding. Usually enough is one or two people have that understanding or have different understanding of different things. So I think it's again, I feel like it's like a culture thing. And I think the other thing is like you kind of have to have the”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it's always like a different people in a company will have different understandings. It's not like you can expect everyone will every day go to see everything and has this. But we do sometimes sessions with the team or we do record videos with the customers. We kind of write notes and we share this with people. I feel like, again, it's like fairly apparent. Like if people”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of has to be with the customers or talk to them and then understand where the product might work well or where it might fall short.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think about it. But usually we have some kind of question we want to answer. It's like, I wonder what is going on. And then we look at it versus like, let's just pull some metrics and then decide that we should increase this metric. And then the magic part is like what happens when you kind of build this understanding, like everyone in the company builds, it's not like everyone has the same understanding, but like everyone builds more of that customer and product understanding, then we have discussions like what should we be doing or what decision we want to make here, then everyone is much more like kind of informed of the actual reality of the customers or the product. And then we think like you can much more like use your intuition or thinking to do those decisions and you don't have to use data or metrics to back those things up. So that's like, I think the main thing is like the whole company.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like any project we start with, we do some level of user research. And as founders, like different people on the team, we might have weekly calls with customers or users. We also encourage everyone in the team, go to the customer Slack, they answer people questions. We have shared Slack channels with customers. Anyone like I sometimes go answer the questions there. I also see when they complain about something. I think the first part is like the whole team kind of has to be really understanding the product and the customers and the problems people are facing and kind of have that like empathy and as well as like the understanding like what is the state of things today. And then we talk about that and then sometimes we might pull up stats and see like, oh, wonder is there some kind of patterns we see like, okay, these kind of companies are using this thing more and what”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We like to talk about this internally. Mixture of magic and science and how we described it is always some level of science that we do. And I think some companies are very scientific on their product management that they like to measure everything and they do a lot of tests and things, but we just decided we don't think that's necessary or that's a good for us. So the science for us means that we do talk to users a lot and like the whole”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feature. Like we don't actually have that. We just think that there should be features that help companies. And sometimes we can look at the metrics before we start working on it. Let's see what this state of things are. But we don't necessarily want to set like, oh, we need to increase the specific metric by x. It's more like we want to solve this problem. And ideally, the success way looks like customers agree that the problem is solved or they enjoy the solution. And it's not like that the metrics went up.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we might have a company level call sometimes, like, for example, weekly active users, like that's like a metric we want to increase or something. But in terms of specific features, we don't have goals for those. And the reason is that I think product like us or a system that is used by different kinds of companies and kind of it's like a system made of multiple different parts and it's not like a very it's not necessarily like you want to optimize any specific thing about it it's like also companies are a little bit different so like their usage of different features can like differ because they just operate slightly differently or their team size is different or the setup of the team is different or the culture is different so there's like a i think like for example i don't know some like instagram or some of these apps it's like yeah we need to drive engagement and that's like the main feature like that's the main metric for every”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If something happens, like, I don't know, we really need to jump on this other thing, at least some kind of initial state that we decided before we want to do these things. And then now something else happened. And so now we had to go on this thing. So you have like an answer when someone comes to you to ask, why didn't you do this other thing before? Then you can say, well, we did decide to do that, but then something happened and we had to do this other thing. So the cycles is like, it's very similar to sprints, but we like to call it cycles because we are not really sprinting anywhere. The cycles also run on like automated schedule. So it's like you don't have to think about which date does it start or every time set it up manually. So it's just like runs automatically. And so it's just meant to help the team to focus on let's just like focus on these few things and forget about the infinite list of other things that are”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for example, the cycles is optional. Not every team has to use it or not, the whole company has to use it, but it's there as you can turn it on or off. But basically, I think why we created cycles is that I think any team that works on software or some other products, like you always have almost like infinite list of things to do. And that list gets longer every day. And it can be sometimes very distracting for the individual or for the team to decide. There's a new thing coming in. Like, should we work on that? Or should we work on this other thing we decided in the past? So the cycles is just a way to say that for the next week or the next two weeks or whatever timeframe, we are going to work on these things and like these are the things we think are the priority or the focus for this time frame. And then the team can try to focus on those things now.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you just end up with a very generalized solution. So then what we're trying to do with the opiumated solution is that that's the best solution or the most optimized solution we think of. And then when you use it, hopefully you agree and like you can feel that it's not optimized. So being opinionated, it's like I think the value it provides people is like you don't have to think too much like or spend some more time on the tool than you do on your actual work.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is like, I don't know, built some new feature or like fix something or design something, like 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. How does this feature work? Like you can use it 10 different ways. And then everyone, every team or everyone figures out the different way of doing it. So our thinking is like we like to provide this good defaults 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 like design something for someone. It's very hard to design everything for everyone.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first, like 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 kind of also it relates to how we build Linaire as well. So you might understand why we make some choices because this is like the way we think about making these choices. So we're trying to share our thinking behind the product. And it's just like, here's the product and like figure it out. Yeah. So like the open-a piece, like I personally have this belief that productivity software should be, and especially company software should be open-ended. 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”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some projects don't say how specific states do them, but I would say roughly usually we do start with design so there's some explorations on the design like, okay, there's like different ways that we could approach this or something. There's just one way because it's pretty clear. But then what I said before is that we do try to get into the building phase as quickly as possible. Because then we can also see is this direction actually reasonable? And what else does it call? Is there some problems it causes or how does it just generally feel here? So I think that there isn't specific like. Review stages. It's more like, yeah, let's check on this project every week or every two weeks. And then before releasing, let's also make a review of it and really test it out that is it the quality we want”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say, like a lot of things that we do is more like that, that we don't do AP testing or we don't do specifically GoFollow certain metrics or something. We might sometimes, we do have telemetry or we can look at how people use certain things and we sometimes do that. But that's not usually the goal we have in mind. It's like, yeah, we should move this number this much. So it's more about based on the understanding of the problem we have and based on the what we think is right is this the right solution and is this a good enough solution to be released to the customers?”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think with that feature, it's like it's been working well, but then also now being exploring, it's like after using it a while, we think like, oh, actually there could be more robust way of following these updates. Maybe people could maybe the leadership could just get these updates over email or maybe when you have a lot of updates, you should have a search or like a filtering system or something. So I think a lot of times we just think like, okay, this is like the scope of it for now and we are okay launching this and the execution is good, but we know that this is not the fully figured out version and we just need to see people trying it out and like see the feedback.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Updates, and it's like a common thing companies do it's like you need to write an update on your project. Is it yellow, green, red? And like companies have very different ways of doing this in different tools. And we just thought like, well, I think it would be really, really nice if it's inside Linear. And the team, when they work on a project, they can write the update. Linear can also capture some of the stats, like what actually happened.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then when it looked all good in the demos and stuff, and then I went to try it and tried different lengths of messages and stuff. And then I started to see like, oh, sometimes the animations are kind of janky. Or it's just like off. Like they don't go the right way on the screen doesn't scroll exactly right. So then I just like captured those things and like send it to the team. And so we had to kind of pull back the release a little bit until those things were fixed. That one was like it's very like I think like a simple concept and it's like very known concept like, okay, this is how threading comments works. So that was mostly about like, okay, what's the execution of this? But then we have projects where we are like not sure exactly how this should work. And like we can't really try it ourselves. We also have to see how companies use it. So something like we built this feature project.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start fixing everything. It's more like let's try to get the main concept there and figure out how it works. But then before we are launching it, I might just go in and try it out and try the different states and click it around. And sometimes I find things like we were building this threading to comments.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been doing exploring different ways of doing this. I think today I still run the design team. So I do see some of the designs on a weekly basis. And then I or one of the other co-founders or one of the head of product, we are basically the sponsors for the projects. So then we are kind of like responsible reviewing the reviewing the work. And so we might just have a meeting where we go through, okay, let's go through the demo and people can explain what's going on and like how they think about it and why. And then we might have feedback, okay, this seems like strange or something. And then I might just after that, I might just like go into the product myself and like try it out and then what happens sometimes like it's like In the initial stages, like obviously, we're not going to like.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you approach things? How do you treat customers? How do you build the website or the product? All of these things start to build this idea, like what does this company mean to me in people's heads? I know we both work at Airbnb and I think Franceski is like, I think the brand was probably the most important thing for him. And I don't know how many hours or meetings or conversations there was about the brand. And it's like the brand was always like, it's like part of everything the company does. Because it's true. It's like, yeah, you could book things like places to stay and a lot of places on the web. But when people think about like, oh, I want to like stay in some cool place. They're going to think about Airbnb. It's like they're not going to think about those other places. So that's like the power of the brand. So like people stop thinking about the other things or they start understanding like, okay, this is the thing for this.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, I think the brand should be always authentic, and it should kind of like, I think even people, if people can't articulate it, if people start to feel like something is off, I think there can be companies or startups, they think about brands like, oh, brand is the local or the colors of the website or something. And then they do the same thing and some other company does. And then they think like, okay, now we have a brand. But you actually didn't think about what's your brand, like what is the message or voice you want to talk about. And it doesn't have also like the brand doesn't happen overnight. So it's basically just you start in the beginning. And like when you start a company, you don't have no brand. And so you have to create it and you create it over time by the things you do, the things you say, like how you say them and like what kind of”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something that you, if you can build a brand, then I think it's like, it doesn't really, even the product almost doesn't matter. It becomes this kind of default, like, I don't know, like, again, like Apple or Nike, it's like, yeah, there's all kinds of shoes you can buy, but there's a reason for someone to buy Nike shoes other than some random brand, even if the random Still buy an IK because they like, I don't know, like the brand. So then I think both the design of the product, but also the design of the brand can be very strong kind of things that pull people to your company or to the product.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, I mean, like, just think about, I don't know, any product category. It's like basically people have then lower choices and then they have your day make choices. Like maybe there's a specific thing they want, but like a lot of people don't necessarily know what is the specific feature I want from this software. So it's more like, well, what is the best one? Like what is the highest quality one? And if you put things side by side and you just people see things, people are visual. So then like the design can be one of those things is like stand styles is like, well, that looks the best or that looks the most quality product to me. So I'm going to use that one. Like when people have a lot of choices, they probably will pick the one that looks more interesting. And then I think there is the second part is the brand, which is.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is really bad, and then you wouldn't feel that way. So I think similar like SaaS, it's like your landing page or some of the other things. It's like they are already communicating something to that user. And the setting the expectations. And then I think that that can be very useful thing, especially early on when no one really knows you or knows the product or cares about you. So I think especially I feel like design can be very good leverage in the beginning.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Similar to technology, it's like if you have good technology, it's easier to do certain things and the product works better in some ways than you having a bad technology or bad infrastructure. So similar to design, I think if you have a good design and people are or even like a good brand, people are drawn into it. And then it makes some user acquisition or user retention or just even people perception of the product better. I think an example is packaging and products is like Apple or a lot of companies spend a lot of time effort into that packaging because it's kind of like already sets the expectations for the user who is receiving the product is like even before you use the product you like start thinking that this is a high quality product and like I'm going to love it. And then like when you actually have it then you actually like might feel that way unless the product”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very basic if you want that kind of website today, no one would really pay attention. So I think the design is always like a Very basic thing now that from pretty much from the very beginning you need pretty high level design of people to even like pay attention or consider you seriously. And I think it's like it's not necessarily fair because like sometimes it's like maybe the product is really good, but they didn't have a designer or they didn't have time to do it. And then people just kind of like dismiss it because it doesn't seem like something that interests them. So I think that's the first thing. It's like I think it is And it's going to be more and more important. But I would also say like design is never going to be like the reason or like the reason why a company is successful. It's like the company still has to have some other things that the product still needs to be something, it needs to be better in some ways or needs to be different in some ways. And then like a design is just like enabling some of these things.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My belief is that any domain or industry, the more it matters, the more the design matters. I think it's kind of like it's fairly easy to see in different in software or in other industries. It's like, what happens is whenever there's a new paradigm, I don't know, it's like the mobile or the web or something. The first iterations of those products existing there, they don't have to be super well designed necessarily because they are the first. But then like as you built the hundreds like thousand different email clients, any email client now has to be pretty good to behave and considered like an email client. It's like the bar is so high. So I think today the startups, like, I don't know if you look at the web page Google launched with or like the web-page YouTube launched with or some of this older companies, they were.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we will definitely hire more. It's like, I think what I said before is, I think we like to see him, the PM smarts operating on a higher level. The whole company, I think the way we trying to build it is like we have less people, but people who are more high caliber and can think about larger scope than what their current role is. So I think we're just like trying to build this like a smaller units, but more effective units, which I think where the BMs go and there would be also less of them every level. But I think in the future as the company grows and the team grows and the product grows, we might have like several BMs that are focusing on or looking at specific areas or specific types of things of the product or specific customers or something like that.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the engineers are actually using the product and they're updating the things. It's for the BMs it would be much more easier to get what is the state of things and maybe trust that much more because people actually use the product. So in some ways, I think we're trying to kind of make it easier for everyone and easier for the engineers. They can focus more on their work. And then for BMs, I think we're trying to make it so that they can also focus on more on other things. Then it's just like, I don't know, managing the tool that they use. Like I think that's not the most important job of a VM. I think they should be thinking more of the, I don't know, bigger picture or other problems or figure out the next features or something.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways I would say that with Linear, we're trying to help the whole company. And I think engineers is probably the largest user group of the product. And I think in some ways, we want to make the BMs job easier that they have to spend”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we are around 50. Probably the only thing I'll say is it's like the hiring front that you really need to spend more time on it and basically you cannot really interview engineers only for the engineering skills. You also have to interview them for the product skills. And obviously you cannot, I think, expect that people have some like, if you do some kind of BM interview for them, it's not they're not going to have the same kind of skill set or the same understanding of the concepts or something. But like the way we've done it in the past is like basically I might interview them about the product. I'm not a technical person per se so I will just like ask them questions about like how did they do something or how do they think about something and it's similar to other roles too it's like we just look for like do this personal opinions about about products and how they work and like and they form opinions and and can they kind of use their own judgment and at times and then like can they communicate or articulate those things as well”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When changes or like communicating how the progress happens. And so it's definitely like it means that the engineers or designers also have to do these things and they do need to communicate and they do need to think about the scope or things. It's a different way of doing things. And also not everyone wants to do that, which is fine. But in the hiring from try to hire people that are kind of interested in the broader scope than just like the specific skill set that they have.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, I mean, definitely, I think what it means is, and there's definitely trade-offs. So, like, I think sometimes when companies specialize roles a lot, it's like because if it's more efficient, like if the engineer spends 100% of their time coding something, then it's like they're using their skill set to the max. But then we just think that in order to build quality things or build things in a certain way, it's actually better if people actually also spend some time thinking about things and not just like executing. So yes, like for every project, there's a project lead that lead can be engineer or designer. It's not like a formal role or it's not based on your whatever level or it's just like you need to be a certain title that you can be that. It's more like an assignment that like, okay, now you're responsible getting the project started and working together with the team, like figuring out and then communicating.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some other companies are doing, but we didn't want to do that, so we wanted to figure out what is actually useful way to use this data or get this data. So he helped us with that. And then we kind of saw like, yeah, this could be useful in other larger areas or overall with the whole product. It's like we might have this kind of questions like, what should we exactly be thinking around here and like why and like how would we like define this direction and then like help the teams to also like align on it so like it to us it's more like he's kind of like the figures out the direction of the product and and and like steers the some of the efforts and not like he's there in every meeting and like making every decision or writing every spec or or something like that”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We started to see that we have enough features and areas of the product and also the team is bigger that it's hard to keep kind of aligned on all of these things or like even keep track of things. And initially we actually hired none as a contractor to help us with this insights data tool. So we have this like data tool feature built in Linear so you can get like data on what's happening in the workspace. For us founders, we realized like none of us are like we are not super experienced in data tools. So we need someone to help out and luckily non was like we knew him and like he actually worked at mode which is a data tool. And so we initially hired him like can you help us figure out like what exactly should this data tool tool and how should it work? Because I think there's different ways of doing that and I think always the easiest way is like let's just copy.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It only works if you exactly hover over the menu and then what happens is the user often misses with few pixels what they were trying to like do. So what the Andreas did, which we didn't tell him to do, is like, yeah, this kind of sucks and like we should make this better. And so he figured out the way to create those safe areas that are dynamic based on the sub-menu positioning and everything. So it's much easier now. Like you can go diagonally to the actual thing you want to go to. So I think these kind of things happen when you give. Like more of the ownership of the project and also the space to do that. And then you also have leadership or generally the company culture that values the quality or the craft.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This button go, or how does it work? And I think a lot of that this graph for us happens when we give the project team this ownership and the project team is just engineering and design and then when they start building that feature, they start seeing these opportunities that this thing could be better. Like a good example of this is like one of our engineers Andreas like when we were building this right click menu in the app so you can right click different things and under that you have submenus like macOS does this well where it's like when you when you open that menu you hover on the menu and then you want to go to the sub menu so you hover to the right you don't have to go like exactly like horizontally to get into that menu you can actually go kind of like diagonally or like you don't actually have to hit the menu exactly there's like this kind of safe zone but like a lot of software like just implements like hey let's do this menu let's make”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or shipping. And I think what I said to them, you need to align on it. It's like you cannot run a company with multiple different kinds of cultures. I think I made some points like why the quality is important for certain kind of products. And you should all kind of believe in that and then instill that with everyone you hire. The other thing I would say that what we like to do is we actually don't have much BMs in a company. We only have one. And we can talk more about it, but one of the things I think that happens is when you build a team and you start creating this very specific roles for everything where I think that often the BM can be the one that figuring things out and like making decisions and guiding the team. But they're not the ones building the feature. So they're not there looking at it like the whole day. It's like how is this where?”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source