YouSaid · the spoken record

Nan Yu

lines on the record: 84
first: 2025-01-30
most recent: 2025-01-30
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

“Yeah, I'm on X slash Twitter as the non you. It's T-H-E, and then my name. And if they have any feedback about Linear, we're very happy to take it, especially for people who kind of use it in their day-to-day. We really want to hear from users.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did that. We're like, okay, hopefully, you know, hopefully we can salvage this inventory and not have to take a write down. It sold out in like a week. And we're like, oh, okay, I guess we just made a hit product. And it's like one of these things where it's very hard to know what this was, right? Was this like a marketing thing? Was this a design thing? I don't know, but we just kind of come together and you find the right product market fit in the weirdest way.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, I mean, to be clear, I witnessed the creation. I don't think I had a direct hand in it. Yeah, so I saw this advertisement the other day on Instagram for, it's called a women's box cut tea. And it's a t-shirt that's kind of wide and short, right? For women. And I looked and they had like 20 colors of it. And it's like, and it sells super well. And I remember when we created this thing. And it was because there was a batch of defective men's t-shirts. They all came in like an inch and a half too short. And so like we couldn't sell them, right? You would have your belly button sticking out. Like no one wanted to wear that. And then so what we did was like, well, we have to salvage the inventory because we were a very small company and we had to make cash flow and we couldn't just damage it out. So the design team and the marketing team kind of came together and they said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to cut another two inches off of this and make it really cropped, right? And market it towards women as like a cropped boxy silhouette. And we.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The correct amount is too much minus one. And I think this kind of ties into the try the extreme version of it of a thing where, I don't know, a stupid example, like how much pizza do you want to eat? It's like, well, five slices was too many. I feel bad. And then four was probably the right number. And then if you want to find the right number, sometimes you just have to like really shoot for the edge and then find out what's too much. And then you'll find out exactly what the right amount is.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't discover it, but I discovered a version of it that was really interesting. There's a pen. Actually, I have one on my desk. It's called the Sakura Micron. I don't know if you use these. It's like a felt tip pen. It's really great, right? It was originally invented in Japan for artists to draw comic books and stuff. And you can use it for anything. I use it for journaling or whatever. But I was on Amazon. I was looking, you know, I was trying to buy more. And I found a package that said like Bible study kit. I was like, why is this labeled Bible study kit? And it was literally just the pen and like in like four different colors. And it was because the thing doesn't bleed through pages. So if you have like a Bible, which they often have these kind of like really flimsy kind of newsprint pages, it's not going to bleed through. And it's just really interesting to me that someone marketed a normal package of these pens as a Bible study kit. And for people who were looking for that keyword. And it's like it was like a official too. It was not some.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've watched the diplomat on Netflix, I think it was. Terrific. It's really fun. Easy watch. It has some West Wing vibes if you were into that back in the day.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I saw this the other day. I was at a cafe in my neighborhood, and I saw a kid rip a handle off a door of the cafe. He pulled it so hard, it came right off because it was a push door, but it had a handle that looked like you could pull it. And that's like one of the canonical examples of the book. Sermon doors are just mysteries. Yeah.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the one book that I recommend the most is The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. I read it originally in college for an HCI class I was taking. And I think of everything I've ever read, it's the thing that sort of caused me to see the world from the perspective of everything you interact with as a product, right? Every single, every pencil that you use, every door that you open is a product that somebody designed.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This might be my hot take, but we do almost no estimating. In order to hit deadlines. What we do is we ship as early as we can. So if the thing we talked about earlier, where like if by the time that 10% of the time has elapsed, you have a working thing. You can now spend the rest of the time deciding whether or not you want to do another iteration or you want to polish that thing and get it to be a shippable state. So you're kind of setting up your future self to be able to make that decision. So none of this is you can't go into this at the very last moment and say like, okay, now we have to take the deadline seriously, right? You kind of have to do it from the beginning and commit to the process of going very fast, iterating early, and then putting yourself in a position where you can say yes or no to a product.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's usually having to do with some kind of external marketing type of exercise that you're trying to hit. And I think that that's like the other thing as builders, we can often look at launch dates and stuff like that. It's like, oh, you know, who cares if it's a little bit later or we skip this changelog or whatever it is? And I think that that's really, I don't know, it makes me go crazy when I hear people say that in all honesty with marketing, communication customers, you basically have a limited amount of opportunities to do so. A year is 365 days. There are 12 months, right? Each of those months has about four weeks. Like there's some rhythm where you get to have 50-ish weeks to say something to your audience once a week. Or you get to have 12 months to say something really big or four quarters to say something huge. If you miss one of those opportunities, you don't get it back again. You can't like time travel back and say like, okay, actually, let's redo first quarter and say this message that we wish we could have gotten out into the.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to be able to actually have a product that you can say yes to. It might not have all the features you had wanted or whatever it is. And you can say no, right? You can make that choice, but you want to set yourself up to be in a position where you can actually say yes or no to something. Because what often happens is like, oh, we want this thing. Well, it's not even close to being done yet. So there's no possible way we can say yes, right? I can't ship it. It's just half broken. It's like, no, no, you want to get to a point where it works, right? It might not be the product that you want, but it is an actual real product that you can conceivably ship.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the only way to make deadlines real is to take them so seriously that they are basically like a P0 problem. And everything else has to not matter in comparison to the deadline because that's the only way you're going to be able to signal to the team and also to all the stakeholders that you're actually taking it seriously. So my feeling on deadlines is don't have too many of them, right? And when you do, it's a P0. The engineer is working on it. They don't get to work on anything else. Like someone's, oh, I need them for this. Like, don't nope. You're not pulling them off of anything. We're doing this as a PM. Your job is to just cut as much scope as possible to make it possible to hit that deadline, right? Like what are the things actually blocking us from doing it? Because what you want to do is at the moment where you have to make the go-no call on whether the ship”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what often happens is people get depressed about deadlines. They like, hey, here's the ship date. And then you never make it. I don't know if you've had this feeling before. Absolutely. You were an engineer before, too, right? So it's just like engineers is better like, oh yeah, yeah, deadlines, they're complete fabrications.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you're in the interview loop, right? These are people that you're going to be working closely with. So start there, right? Do your discovery questions. And if there's an area that you think you want to dig, you can ask. There's no harm asking, hey, can you put me in touch with an engineering manager who's like working on the same problem? And if no one else is asking, again, you're going to have an extra piece of feedback from that engineer. So, yeah, like this guy asks really good questions. And it seems like they're really with it. No one else is going to have that piece of feedback. So during the debrief process.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know you can invest a lot in the Then you know where you're going to have both the highest chance of success of getting hired but also like doing a really great job on the other end of it.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a lot of times when you take that approach, it'll feel like you already work there. The way that I did this, I got advice from a friend. He said, like, I was interviewing for this job at mode that you referenced. And I'm like, how should I approach it? He's like, just apply you already work there. What would you do? And then it's like, okay, I could do that. So then when you're in this interview process and someone, you know, someone's asking you a question, they go, do you have any questions for me? You can ask them, like, what are your OKRs this quarter? How can someone help you achieve those, right? You can like be that specific about it. Like, like, oh yeah, sure. I can tell you about the exact thing that I'm doing this quarter. And then you'll have some level of intelligence about what's, you know, what people are actually trying to solve. Because I think often we just get stuck in these very high level general types of questions. So like, what are, you know, what's the company goal of all kinds of stuff? And it's like, no, you can get really specific. Like if you were collaborating with that person in your job, what would you say to them?”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Else. And I think what ends up happening a lot is when we're in the interview process, you're just trying to put your best foot forward, trying to say that you're great at everything. You have very few weaknesses. Maybe you try too hard, like whatever it is, right? And then, but everyone's going to say that. So you're just like one of end people. And you want to make yourself a little bit of like just you versus the field, right? Like you are the solution to a problem and then everyone else is, you know, sort of like a roll of the dice.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product management is kind of a unique role, right? Like, because we do just about everything, you don't really get pigeonholed into being sort of compared along a single dimension with everyone else. And everyone who's hiring PMs, just like when they're hiring execs, they're kind of hoping that they bring them on to solve some burning problem that they have. And so it's your job when you're in the interview process to figure out what that burning problem is. So like put on your discovery hat, right? And go figure out what is the actual sort of like job to be done of the hiring manager when they're bringing on a new PM onto their team. And if you can do that, right, and then make a good case that you are the person to solve that problem, then hiring you becomes a sort of like binary choice between do I hire the solution to my problem or do I hire someone?”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I know the word product marketing is also so overloaded. They do so many different things. But it's that sort of like content creation piece that you really have an opportunity to contribute to”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think originate the message that you sent to your audience, right? Like there's a lot of things that marketing does which you're never going to necessarily touch, right? There's always like demand gen and figuring out channel strategy and all this kind of stuff. Like, sure, right? That's a pure marketing concern. But actually picking the words and where the emphasis is, like you should understand the customer at a pretty deep level, probably deeper than any other group at the company because, you know, because of the kinds of requirements gathering discovery that you're doing. So you're going to know the native language that your customers speak a lot better and help your marketing team originate those words.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. In fact, if you're leaving something on the table, right, in terms of the kind of impact that you are having at your job, that's probably the thing that you're leaving on the table. You're probably already doing a good job of collaborating with engineering and design, right? It's probably the sort of cell side that you're kind of, that there's an opportunity for you to have more impact.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think PMs, right? Like product managers, we often have a tough time trying to explain what is your job, right? It's like a little bit of everything. And I think the job that I sort of do, that we see it as is you're taking the sort of building side of the organization and the selling side of the organization and bring them together. You're taking all of the commercial motivations and goals of the company and making sure that what you build actually solves for those goals. And you're sort of tempering that with like what's possible and sort of where the opportunities are to actually build stuff. So to me, it's the PM in the middle and then you have engineering product design and then sales marketing product management on the other side.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly, like for example. So I think that's a big part of what we have to do, right? So on our PM team, we actually have a full-time product marketer, right? And her job is to. Tactically, it's like all the change logs come from her, all the release notes, right? And also, she's always crafting the language for whatever upcoming release that we're building and working with directly with the teens and trying to figure out how to talk about it. And then go out and build the campaigns, build assets and things like that, that's where a lot of the language is coming from. It's coming from the work that she's doing. And then with sales, like they're validating all that message in the field, right? They're saying the words to customers directly and telling you if it's like sticking or not. And then you can kind of like, you know, have a really good feedback cycle between those three disciplines.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like engineers is a big one, but even product managers, right? Like, product managers kind of know when they know what the job is like. So when you kind of come in, you say the wrong words, people give you the stink eye”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often I feel like in organizations you actually see kind of like some antagonism between product and sales and marketing. And I think that's kind of a shame, right? Because when we kind of come together, the way we think about selling is a matter of like, especially because we sell to, we sell the very sort of expert practitioners and they have a very sensitive BS detector, right? So a big part of what we try to do is we try to help them pick, which I hope our marketing team pick exactly like the right word in the right phrasing to make us sound like negative to the language that our customers speak and also engineer.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, something that's worked really, really well for us is we think of product management as partially like a go-to-market discipline in the same way that sales and marketing are, right? Like when you talk to people and like, hey, tell me how product management works in your company, they'll probably say something about like, well, there's engineering, product and design. They work in this triad. And here's how they interact and collaborate. And we all kind of understand why that's useful, why it's helpful. But this sort of other form of collaboration between product management, sales, and marketing, I think it's something that's like probably really under examined and often”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, it's definitely kicked in in a way. And I think sometimes when people talk about, you mentioned being opinionated. And I think sometimes when people talk about being opinionated, it can feel like they're almost saying like, hey, this is like kind of arbitrary, right? Like your opinion, my opinion, they're just two opinions, man. Neither is right or wrong. What we try to do is find where there's actual consensus amongst a lot of different high performing teams. And then we can take those practices and say like, okay, for a team that isn't already practicing this, can we give them a button so that they can start practicing this? When a company, we see companies doing a really good job of managing their triage queue and, but it's like, you know, it's very manual. Okay, can we automate this? And then for this other company that really needs it, they don't know this is what they need. Can we just give them a button to activate this? And now they have the practice within their or two.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And I think the most salient example of this is if you've ever seen a company adopt an ERP product, it's the most painful thing you can imagine, right? They have to, you know, it's doing deep surgery. They have to redo all of their internal processes and the way they manage inventory and all this kind of stuff. But they're willing to do it because they know that this is a battle tested way of making sure that you're actually doing good management of resources. So they're like, we're growing up now. It's time for us to adopt these best practices. In order to do that, we have to adopt this tool and we will conform to whatever the tools used to do.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all that stuff probably comes equipped with a tool because those are the right practices to do when you're doing this sort of marketing exercise. And whether you knew about it before or you learned it from the tool, like as a buyer for this kind of product, what I'm doing is I'm saying like, hey, I'm going to bring in this baseline level of marketing competency into my organization, right? That like this is the worst we can do is whatever the tool defaults are.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you think about how a lot of B2B software gets created, it's because there was some person in the middle of some giant company who implemented some kind of process. And they're like, wow, this process is really working for us. Maybe we should make it easier. And they build a little tool internally and then like all of their colleagues can now press on buttons and good things happen. And then they turn that process and that tool, they spin it off into a startup and they like make a startup. This process repeats thousands of times. So when you adopt that tool, you're not just adopting the actual software. You're adopting the idea that this is a practice that you ought to be doing in the first place. So, you know, like if you're a marketing person, right, and you adopt some marketing software, you're not just saying like, okay, now I can, you know, kind of write emails and send to people. There's all sorts of process around that. Like you're organizing stuff into campaigns, you're measuring click-through rates. You're like calculating cost of acquisition.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the best solutions are always obvious in hindsight, right? And it's just like you have to develop a process internally to eventually find your way there.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We roll out some of these versions to people. So the super fast version that was unsafe. That only went internal, and everyone felt it was too unsafe. But then we thought, okay, let's go to super safe version, and then we roll that out, and everyone started having a whole bunch of, we did the like, how many drafts are people making? Like, this is too many. Like, the people are leaving behind like this crazy paper trail. Okay, we gotta, we got to figure out some difference here.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for a lot of companies, you have to ask what is the promise that your product or your business is making people? It might be you always have a car available if you need it. And if you do that, then like maybe we're going to have to implement search pricing to make that happen, right? Like it's always going to be available. So here's the trade-off that we have to make. It's like a very extreme point of view to do that. Or you might say like the price is always predictable, but sometimes you can't have a car in the first place. Those are all sort of choices that you get to make. And you kind of have to sort of decide where in that spectrum does it make sense based on the promise of your company.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With we're just going to auto save everything, and someone doing a sort of analysis, if they did like a detailed teardown of these decisions, they might say like, wow, they made very specific choices here. But the path to get there is to do something totally extreme in one direction and then totally extreme in another direction and then find where they really meet up.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so many on top of folders, right? Because, yeah, because the moment you say new folder, it starts saving it, and then you don't actually need for that to happen. So we had those two sorts of variations that we built and we fell through. And where we ended up was like a sort of balance between those two, right? And so what happens is if I'm creating a new issue like I am here and I close it out, it'll interrupt me. We have to interrupt you, otherwise it feels too unsafe. So I can save the draft, right? I can go to my drafts. And then if I'm in this sort of draft I've already made and I go in there and I, you know, and I start to say like, okay, I'm going to keep working on it. But then I get interrupted again, then I'm just going to auto save it for you. There's no, there's no point. I'm not going to ask you again. I'm always going to auto save because I'm not going to create a new object. I'm just making modifications in place. So we made this sort of very specific choice of like on a brand new issue, we will interrupt you. And then on an existing draft that you're messing around.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cool, but it also ended up leaving behind a whole bunch of a paper trail of things you change your mind about, right? You've probably had this happen in document tools where you have a whole bunch of things in your space called like untitled document or like new document and stuff like that.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Save it as Raft, you can save it as draft. If you decide to not, you want to throw it away, you don't want it to hit the X button, and it will just throw it away. We're not going to interrupt you with a pop-up that says, like, do you want to save your changes or any of that kind of stuff? We'll just absolutely get out of your way as possible. So we're like, what's the risk here? Well, it might feel really unsafe, right? If we, if you close this and we don't like ask if you want to save chains, you might feel like, oh, I just lost my changes on accident. We knew that going in, right? We built this anyway. And yeah, it felt super unsafe, right? It turns out that sort of inkling that we had was true, right? But we really felt exactly how unsafe it was. So then we were like, okay, well, what's the safest thing we could possibly do? The safest thing is just auto save everything, right? So you start a new issue and then you start typing some stuff. And it's just like auto saving as soon as you type a single character. And that did feel quite safe.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, so this is just like a demo space instead of linear. So the feature where we did this that I remember very clearly because it was kind of recent, is we built this feature to save drafts for your issues. So linear as hard as an issue tracker. If I make a new issue, and let's say I'm trying to report a bug or something, right? So it's like I make a bug report, then I might start thinking through like, okay, what are the repro steps? And then I start typing them. And this happens all the time, right? When you're at work, you're doing this. And someone distracts you. Someone pings you on Slack or you have to go to a meeting or something like that. You're like, I got to put this away for a second. I'll come back to it later. Like, you know, note the self, you know, figure out the actual repro steps and do it. So like, what can you do? Like, well, you want to save it as a draft. So we're like, okay, this is the problem. And the first version of this, right? We're like, okay, the most, what do we want to do? Like linear is developing fast. So we don't want to get in your way. We want to say like, what is the fastest draft saving experience possible?”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you actually build it, right? You can think of a very extreme version of a product of things like, hey, let's actually, for the first version, you know, we talked about the first version you know, it's not really the right answer. Sometimes you know it's so hard because you know this is the most extreme version of the answer. So let's build that as fast as we can and see how it feels. And then we're going to learn so much about like what the right actual answer is because we will have seen this area of the product space and really felt it”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the biggest risk is you didn't see the right choice to begin with, right? You have these three choices, and by none of them were right. It's this fourth one that was like over in this corner, but you didn't look in that corner, so you never found it. And so I think the goal of this is to try to expand the search space of what you're trying to do.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you think in that way, right? When you're saying, like, hey, what's the, you know, what's the 11 star experience? What you're really asking is like, hey, what's like the most luxurious version of this hotel stay? Or what's the most unforgettable kind of experience we can give people? And you throw away things like, I don't know, like cost. You throw away things like practicality, right? Because that's not what's interesting. What's interesting is I want to actually explore the possibility space. And I think this is really important to do because the goal is to get you to see beyond like your defaults, right? We have all of these constraints that we're operating under that we like kind of psychically have in the back of our heads that we just like don't even realize we have them. So just to break past all of them. And then you can really see what your options are. Because we talk about like product decisions. It's like, oh, yeah, you have like these choices. What are you going to decide? There's all this decision making kind of theory, right?”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally. I think when people talk about being creative, a lot of times what they have a problem with is extrapolating, right? They can kind of see the stuff that's right in front of them, but like, what about two or three steps down the line? And then it's just like, well, there's just so much possibility. I don't know what direction to go. So the way that we try to do it is we ask a question, which is like, okay, how extreme can you take it? Like you're designing a product, you're trying to come up with a solution. Like, what's the most outrageous version of this along some, you know, some trade? I think, I don't know if you guys did this at Airbnb, but I think Brian Chesky talks about what's the 11 star experience. Is that a thing you guys did?”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's true. I actually hadn't really put that part together, but I think that's, you know, I think some of the reason we've done it this way is because we don't have the bandwidth to action everything. So we kind of like have this backlog that we maintain to make sure that when we do take it on, we're pretty set up for success.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And I want to really stress a nuance here, which is like it's. Not that we want to solve the entire problem. The entire problem is like quite big, right? But there's something that's really ripe for linear to do that help people sort of have a good starting point for them to sort of like reason about it. And so I think a lot of building conviction around stuff is not even like, do we have a workable solution? It's like how much of the problem should we actually take on? Because if we take on too much of the problem, then we'll end up overpromising and not being able to deliver on it.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure. Capacity planning is a thing that's been sitting in our backlog. And it's something we see managers struggle with all the time, right? Which is like, I have a limited amount of personnel and resources and I need to deploy them in such a way where we can theoretically accomplish our roadmap, but also we don't get blocked by some bottleneck, that we don't end up like blocking all of the projects because this one engineer is stuck on some infra thing. And that's a thing people struggle with all the time. All the solutions out there are bad, right? Like the best solution is a very, very custom spreadsheet that someone would make. And it's a lot of upkeep. So we have some ideas about how we might automate this, how we might use existing data within linear to really help out with this problem. But I don't think we've quite cracked it yet, right? I think there's some nuances that we have to really explore a little bit further. So we're kind of, you know, continuously developing this. And as we hear from users that are struggling with this problem, we will get on a call with them and sit down with them and talk through it.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I can tell you a little bit about how we manage our backlog, which I think actually ties directly into this. At any given moment, we have Probably like 20 or 30 opportunities that we could possibly explore, right? Just product opportunities, right? Like problems to solve areas to kind of improve for our users. But they're not ready yet, right? We don't have enough conviction around how we might approach it. So we kind of just accumulate understanding of this stuff. And sort of periodically, we accumulate some more stuff. And then we reevaluate, okay, what is our current understanding, how we might best approach this thing? And I think it's something that people sort of struggle with is like they might have this model in their head, like a PM might have this model in their head about how user behaves, but it's just like very hard to share that with someone else that you have to, you know, you have to tellpathically throw it into their brain, which is hard, right? So what we try to do is kind of identify, you know, areas that we might attack with a product, but also sort of keep an up-to-date analysis of each of those areas so that everyone can kind of like engage with it and also contribute.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The part where you said focus on user I think it's maybe a little bit more salt than that. There's a nuance which is like find where the incentives are really misaligned amongst your user base, right? There's a middle manager that wants really detailed reporting. And there's IC who just really doesn't want to go through all those extra steps. And the incentives for what they want are just like very, they're just very misaligned. And you have to find those situations and be pretty judicious about how you make those trade-offs. and where you can really find kind of like win-win outcomes there.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Came out of two different fields people were having. Like one, people were trying to implement this stuff by hand, and it was just a lot of touches, right? And they were doing it, but they felt like, oh, I'm totally underwater. Why are you underwater? Well, I have to manage all these throw all these tickets around and route them correctly and stuff like that. And they didn't sort of see this as like an opportunity to have a tool specialize in managing their triage queue. They just like because they were managing by hand, they were on top of it, right? But it just felt really bad because they just had to spend so much attention doing this. And then there's the folks who didn't do that. The feeling was just like, well, it's totally out of control. People are just throwing tickets over the wall and I don't know what to do with them. I don't know where they are. They end up in all these holes, right? And then the people on the other side are like, I throw tickets over the wall. I have no idea what happens to them. Like I have no expectation that people are ever going to respond to them. So there's all of these bad views that people are having that are all kind of the same root cause, which is like there wasn't a very automated organized way to deal with your triage cube.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A big sort of feature that people love about Linear is we have this thing called triage management. And what it does is it sort of systemizes this thing where if I put an issue into a different team, if I'm asking them to do something or I'm reporting a bug to them, it sticks in a special zone where it'll notify the right people. They're on a rotation and people will be able to kind of respond to it in a sort of organized manner. And I think this kind of automation, this feature.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I feel like PMs and engineers were like very thinky people. We don't really kind of avoid the touchy feely stuff. And so I think that's the opportunity, right? You can sort of see where are you feeling bad throughout your day where you don't even know, right? You might think, I hate Mondays, right? Like, why do you hate Mondays? Well, on Mondays, I have to go out and gather a whole bunch of stuff to write this report that it's really annoying. Oh, so if I gave you a button that made the report, that helps, like, oh, yeah, then I might not hate Monday so much. And so like, I think Paul Graham has a word for this. He calls it Schlep blindness, right? Like I'm like schlepping through life and I'm just completely blind through it. And that's true, right? You kind of have to have an outsider come in and sort of see your feelings are throughout the day, throughout the week. And kind of note the spots where you could really use a lot of improvement.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source