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

“The background of this, right? I've worked in very, very competitive industries. I worked at Everlane, which was like a direct-to-consumer clothing brand. I worked at mode, which was like BI tools, and there's like so many BI tools out there. And then obviously linear, we're project management. There's a lot of project management tools. And I think the more competitive your industry is, the more the sort of like low-hanging goal-oriented stuff is already picked. Because every PM from everyone's companies has been asking, like, well, like, you know, like, what's your goal? Like, what is your job to be done? All this kind of stuff. And so you have to kind of look at things from an angle that other people might not have seen. And for me, right, and for us, it's the angle of like where are the emotional hooks that, you know, that you're experiencing as you go through your workday, as you use our product, as you use competitors' products. And then I think it's probably underexplored because”
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 if you ask somebody in that last story, what kind of issue do you have? You're like, oh, like, you know, marketing and I would just never align on anything. It's like that doesn't really tell you what's going on. But it tells you it's like you had this terrible moment of communication. It was just, it felt like miscommunicating and you're like, it's just going to keep happening over and over again. And so, you know, the thing that we did specifically to solve this was on projects in linear, you can just specify of target date at whatever level of granularity you want, right? You can say it's a December project. You can say it's a Q4 project. You can say it's a second half of 2024 project. Like whatever you're happy promising, you can just put it on there. And that way you never feel like you have to give this sense of false precision so that it ends up with a whole bunch of miscommunication down the line.”
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're telling me. And it takes a little while to get there, right? Like you can ask people directly, like, how do you feel? And like, they're not necessarily going to tell you. But if you have a long enough and deep enough conversation with them, you start to sort of level with them and you're like starting to see stuff from their perspective. And the more you see it from their perspective and the more they know that, the more they're willing to kind of like open up to you and like tell you like, okay, honestly, like, you know, I had this thing happen where I marked the ship date of this project as December 30th because it's a Q4 project and I wanted to put it at the, you know, very end. And then my marketing team lost their mind because they're like, we can't ship something on December 30th. Everyone's on vacation, right? And you're like, and then they're like, yeah, this has made me feel really bad. So I don't ever want to put dates on things ever again. And so like, okay, cool. We can help you. We can help you deal with that, right? Like if that's what you're feeling, then I can, you know, kind of start building stuff to make sure.”
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 it's funny because I think from the outside, right? I'm on these sales calls and then the AE or someone's like watching me ask these questions. And I think often they're like, what are you doing? Like you're just like asking questions from angles that I don't even know what your goal is here. And my goal is to feel bad in the same way that customers feel bad, right? They come to us with a request, hey, we want X. And it's like there's something motivating it. And it's not You can do the normal analytical thing and be like, ask five whys and like try to figure out like, well, what are your goals? And as a persona X, I want to achieve this outcome. You can do it that way, but you might miss the reason that they actually feel bad for not having this thing. Like, I can't accomplish this goal. So what? So I'm not going to get promoted at work. Like, okay, great. I understand the severity of your problem at this point, right? Like, what is the actual sort of emotional valence that is motivating what?”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“CSM has a one on one conversation with a rep they can like have some kind of evidence that we've been doing stuff for them like all this kind of stuff like okay cool like that's that sounds like a very useful and powerful thing you want to do how do you expect people to like tag these things well manually because that's how we did in our spreadsheets it's like okay instead of that we're gonna hook up with your customer support tools we're gonna hook up with your crms we're gonna automatically bring in like feedback from these companies we're gonna analyze the emails where they're coming from and then we're just If someone requests a feature that gets escalated into engineering, it'll just be tagged with whoever asked for it. Like you don't have to do anything, right? But you will know and you can still report on this stuff. But there's nothing about this that makes IC's lives harder. In fact, it makes them feel more confident because when they're building the thing, they actually understand like who's asking for it and exactly what the email said. So when they get all the, when they're doing the design or the details, they can actually see the real life use cases that are present.”
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'll give you an example of all of these things, right? Which we just launched a feature called customer requests. And basically what this does, right, it adds a new concept to Linear, which is like a customer for B2B companies, this is very relevant. And the reason we did this is because we kept getting this request for fully customized fields, right? And we would be like, well, what is it that you want with your custom fields? Because the problem is you add 100 custom fields and your ICs start hating it, right? So we don't want to go down that path, but like, what is it actually you're trying to do? And like 40% of them were because, well, I have a customer, you know, like, you know, Walmart or whatever, right? Walmart asks for this feature and it's really important. I need everyone to know that Walmart needs this. And I need to track it. I need to see like however we, you know, report. We can report on like what have we done for Walmart over the past year so that when my”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, okay, well, tell me about how you're trying to use this. And there's like a hundred different use cases. So you have choices here, right? You can either build the big feature that covers all the long tail use cases, or you can try to see if there's like really concentrated pools of use cases for this that really make a lot of sense to kind of adopt as a sort of first order type of feature. So I think those are the two sort of strategies that we employ the most, right? It's like, did we think about this wrong? And now we're just learning something about how it matches reality. Or for this big general feature that people are asking for, are there actually more specific kind of use cases that we should be solving and we should be solving really, really well.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of it is you hear something and you're like, gosh, that Ashley is, no one's that true. It means that the way we thought about this was a little bit wrong. And like I call this process, I don't know if it's the right way to describe it. I call it annealing, right? Where like you have a thing and it's not quite the right shape and you put it out into the wild. So this happens like way in the sort of first kind of bit of the life of a particular feature, right? You release a thing and then you start getting feedback about it, but hey, it doesn't quite fit reality. And then you kind of ask yourself like, did I, did we test that aspect of it? Like, did we actually match that part to reality? And if you didn't, then it's like, that's the part where you don't actually need that many pieces of feedback against it, right? It's not really a volume thing. It's like, did we think about this right or wrong? That's one sort of category. Another category is just you're getting, you know, you're getting requests for maybe a very big feature or a feature set from a lot of different people. But then you dig in and you try to say,”
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 a trap that a lot of times PMs will fall into is they will make something and they'll make some choices in it because maybe it's beautiful or it's elegant, but they don't go the step of like, is reality also beautiful and elegant? Because reality is kind of ugly sometimes. And if you have a beautiful elegant solution that doesn't match with reality, it doesn't really matter, right? People can look at it and they can oo and ah, but if they don't use it to get their work done, it's never going to have long-term staying power.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Not a hypothetical person, right? Not one that you made up, like Alice, Bob or whatever is like, no, here's a first name, last name, here's their email. You can ask them. And I think that being able to tie it all the way back to reality in that way is a big part of how we really think about and discuss these things.”
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 that the complicated debates are often when we do add a new native feature, do we extend an existing feature and make it more powerful, or do we add a new sort of service? And a big part of that is kind of trying to figure out exactly who's going to use it, what are the actual real life use cases that we know about that I know that Bob from company X has this workflow. And this is how it would work for him. Here are the different variations where it would work, right? So like tying it all the way back to real people.”
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 also think that with this kind of this particular category of tool and with a lot of other B2B software, Node means not now, right? Not right now because it doesn't fit our budget. It doesn't fit our change management situation. Oh, we have this exec that's really wedded to this other tool. But those things change, right? So we keep in contact with them. They're in our CRM. We make sure we follow up. And we've had a lot of these where we've been said no to two years ago and now we have some new features think like, oh yeah, it seems like you're ready for our scale or whatever.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For buying Yeah, exactly. And I think that we're starting to have enough brand penetration amongst enterprises where people can have that feeling that, hey, linear is for us. Who are we? Well, we are a large company that wants to act like a startup. It's like, who doesn't want that? Who doesn't want to go fast?”
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, Gordon's been good. Growth in enterprise has been leading the other segments because I think this year especially we reached a tipping point where I think with software so much of the buying decision is based on almost like a brand thing. Is this for us? It's like, you know, a lot of times people pick quote enterprise software. It's like, why? You know everyone doesn't want this. And they're like, yeah, but it's like, it's for us.”
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 the thing is, it's not everything you want, right? Because people come with a laundry list, and it's like a laundry list. Here's 10 things I want. Do you want all those 10 things equally? They're like, no, actually, I don't. The first three are the things that really matter to us. If we solve the first three, then the other stuff we can negotiate on. So our job is to solve the first three way better than anybody else. That if they got through the first three through some kind of like visual programming customization type of thing, that it's never going to get to the quality level and the depth that we're able to offer by offering those as native features”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it is, but I also think that there's not as much pressure as you would expect, right? To do these kinds of things. There are basic scaling things. Like, you know, we had to make SAML and Skim and that kind of stuff. It's like, yeah, sure, we're going to do those sorts of, like, keep the lights on type of work. But when it comes to work that's related to the actual business logic of the apps like value proposition, buyers care about is this going to make their team more effective, right? That's the reason that they're making this buying decision in the first place is that they're like, well, you know, the current situation we're in, especially with larger companies, right? The current situation we're in is kind of a mess. And if we can convince them that these types of things are actually the reason that it's a mess, then we can really kind of navigate them out of wanting them in the first place.”
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. I want to track what's happening. Well, what do you want to track? Well, I want to track which version of the product this thing's tied to based on some field information. It's like, okay, how is the person working on this supposed to even know that information? Well, it takes like a five-minute scavenger hunt every single time. It's like, I don't think they're going to do that, man”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do any kind of reporting that has consequence because the data can't possibly be correct. So I think for us, it's a very easy decision when it comes to that particular category of feature request.”
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 director is going to be really excited by this, and we'll definitely make a buying decision based off of this. And we have to kind of convince him that this is a false trade-off, right? The whole premise is wrong because the moment you start going down this path and you make the IC user experience worse, they're just going to disengage. No one has to do this. Like if I'm an engineer, I get paid to write code. My performance review is based on my code contribution. It's not based on like, did I fill in all the tickets? So I'm just not going to do that part or I'm going to do it very sporadically. And then I'm going to just focus on my actual job. And then all your reporting is wrong because all the data is wrong and it's like sparse and you get situations where people will say like, well, here's a drop down field that someone put in here that's required. There's nine choices. I don't know what any of them meet. So I'm just going to pick one at random. I'm still like then pick the first one. Also, I'm going to pray that my boss is not actually using this data.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In order to make reporting a little bit easier, at the cost of making IC workflows worse, right? Like it's like if it fits that description, we're just saying no. There's no debate because we've already thought about it. And this is the thing that we can't take a single step down this path. So I think that's honestly one of the core problems of linear is that we will not make this particular trade-off. So when you see people saying like, wow, you know, linear is so much faster. It's so much easier to use that. It makes my work so much more enjoyable. Like this is the reason because we have not taken a single step in this direction. It's very easy for a PM to say yes to this kind of request, right? Because they're talking with often they're talking with buyers, right? And kind of like B2B type of space. They're talking about whoever the gatekeeper is and sales is putting pressure on them. And they're saying like, hey, we really want this one feature. It's going to make our reporting nicer. So like, you know,”
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 question actually comes to us a lot from candidates that are interviewing with us, right? Like when you go like, hey, like, do you have any questions for us? Like, this is the question that we're going to get. So we hear quite a lot. And it's very sensible for them to ask it, right? Because they see sort of history being kind of like littered with the corpses of startups trying to compete in this space and not making it. And I think when we examine this problem, we kind of look at what kind of feature requests can we debate and what kind of feature requests do we absolutely have to say no to. And the stuff that we absolutely have to say no to is also the exact kind of thing that leads to this kind of like bloatedness that makes ICs kind of hate their lives. And it's very specific. It's customization features requested by middle managers.”
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 have a sort of gradually increasing circle of users that use every single feature. So by the time it hits GA, by the time it gets released, it's been used by a lot of different users at that point. So the first circle is just internal users. We use Linear every single day to write software and do our own work. So we have that kind of advantage. And then once we feel like it's good enough, we'll put it into some beta customer group. Again, as early as we can in the process, right? We have to make sure that we don't end up corrupting people's data and it doesn't look hideous and that kind of stuff. But as long as it reaches that level of quality, we can release it to sort of early access customers who can give us good feedback and also just try to solve their problems with it. If no one engages with it, if no one's using it, then that's a pretty good signal that we didn't really hit the mark. And then we have a couple of different beta audiences that we grow and then the ultimate release obviously is for GA where everyone gets 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 think it's really that sort of attitude and point of view question, right? This sort of understand and take the sort of Almost like controlled risk that the first version of this is not going to be perfect, so it actually makes it a lot cheaper in many ways. It means you don't need a pixel perfect design. It means you don't need to make sure that all of the little UI bugs and stuff like that are solved because none of that really matters, right? What matters is you have working software that you can interact with and you can see if it feels good. Does it actually solve the core problem that is facing our users? You can take it back to users. You can even like let them into an early beta or something like that and get real validation there. And to sort of really focus on getting the smallest kind of shippable element, like not shippable in the sense of like, I can actually put out the production, but in the sense of like I can, you know, start learning from 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
“Yeah, I think that's been the case in Magnus and Hikaru and all those guys who are at the top of their game. They can go unbelievably fast. In fact, that's the usual, I mean, I don't want to get too out of my depth with chess, but the usual way you try to make the game fair is you give them much, much less time than someone who's not quite as strong of a player. And they'll still win a lot of time too.”
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. I mean, use the contractor kind of example. Like if someone's making modifications to your house and it's taking forever, like one, you're in a hotel and also the bills are adding 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
“I mean, there's a lot of components of it. I think having really good talent really helps, right? Having engineers who don't get blocked by every single little design choice, they're happy to just make something workable, even if they don't feel comfortable with that particular solution. They'll just bust through it and make something happen there. Part of it is intent. We don't have any expectation that the first version of it is going to be great. That is not in the cards, right? Like, look, the first version of it is our best guess in the general direction of what we want to actually ship in the end. And sometimes it works out. Sometimes, wow, this first version was pretty good. Let's make some minor adjustments and we're good to go. But there's no expectation there. So no one feels like they have to be a perfectionist and get everything all sanded down and really into tip-top shape, right? It just has to work and get the job done and kind of validate or invalidate our major assumptions.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it really looks like is you have some rough time budget for how long you think something's going to take. And by the time 10% of it has passed, you have a workable solution, right? It's not like, oh, at the halfway point, we have something that is maybe a candidate that we can play around with. It's like, no, no, no. Like after week one, you have something that works, that tests some kind of key hypothesis internally so that you can feel like, is this thing actually panning out the way we expected to or did we have some crazy incorrect assumption? And you don't want to wait till you're 80% done to be able to make that kind of judgment because then it's just too late. Then you're pushing deadlines out and you're, you know, you're making your marketing team very sad.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is like how many iterations were you able to do? So, the only way you're going to get a bunch of iterations done and try different things and really feel out these different variations is by just going very fast.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People talk about this as if there were a trade off. Almost in kind of like a naive way because when they think about speed, the thing they over index on is like rushing or being sloppy. And what they should be indexing on is being really competent or being like an expert. So if you look at people who are like at the pinnacle of their craft, right? It could be anything. It could be like a chef or a programmer or, you know, someone building houses or something. You can basically tell how good the output is going to be of their work product by how fast they're going. They're going really fast. And they're obviously not being sloppy and leaving a mess all over the place. It's like, yeah, well, they got there because this is just second nature to them. And they're able to kind of go at a really rapid pace and try stuff. And when we're building software, that's such a big component of how good the product is 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
“Hate their day to day a little bit. And we all got into technology and design and engineering, all those kind of stuff because it was fun, right? All of us started off like building stupid MySpace pages and all of these side projects when we were young. And it started off as this fun thing that we do. And we're like, wow, we get to do this for a career. And then to have all of this kind of stuff put these big speed bumps into our day-to-day workflow just was really sad. So that's why we started Linear at this sort of really buster all of 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
“It's really good to hear that because, you know, in a lot of ways, that's what we're trying to do. If you think about the entire impetus behind why Linear was started, it's because, you know, Cari was kind of like sitting at Coinbase and Airbnb in these places and just. Watching everyone around him Struggle using the tools that they had available and like always kind of incumbent tools. Like seeing that it kind of made people”
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 we examine this problem, we kind of look at what feature requests can we debate and what kind of feature requests do we absolutely have to say no to? The stuff that we absolutely have to say no to is the exact kind of thing that leads to this bloatedness that makes ICs kind of hate their lives”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What it really looks like is you have some rough time budget for how long you think something's gonna take. By the time 10% of it has passed after week one, you have something that works, that tests some kind of key hypothesis internally.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People talk about this as if there were a trade off because when they think about speed, the thing they over index on is like rushing or being sloppy. What they should be indexing on is being really competent. If you look at people who are like at the pinnacle of their craft, you can basically tell how good the output is going to be of their work product by how fast they're going.”
2025-01-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source