Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
I think you see in the team at Linear that a lot of people don't see, which is that there's not actually a trade-off between speed and quality.

**Nan Yu** (0:06)
People talk about this as if there were a trade-off, because when they think about speed, the thing they over-index on is rushing or being sloppy. What they should be indexing on is being really competent. If you look at people who are at the pinnacle of their craft, you can basically tell how good the output is gonna be of their work product by how fast they're going.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:26)
What does speed look like when you say it can be done quickly and high-quality?

**Nan Yu** (0:30)
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:42)
Imagine a criticism you all get. Over time, you will probably become a bloated piece of software as well.

**Nan Yu** (0:46)
When we examine this problem, we kind of look at, well, 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:02)
Something that your head of sale shared with me is how impressed he is with the way you ask questions on customer calls and just keep digging and digging until you get to something.

**Nan Yu** (1:10)
My goal is to feel bad in the same way that customers feel bad.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:17)
Today my guest is Nan Yu. Nan is Head of Product at Linear, which is one of the most beloved, most beautifully designed and also the fastest growing B2B SaaS product out there today. You rarely see the kind of love that people have for Linear for any enterprise B2B SaaS product, and so there is a lot that we can learn from how Linear operates and how they build product. In my conversation with Nan, he shares a system that he uses for being creative and coming up with non-obvious solutions to customer problems, why it's a red flag to him when PMs tell him there's a trade-off between speed and quality, how he talks to customers in order to figure out the motion that they want to avoid and then figure out the solution to avoiding that emotion, plus some killer advice on how to land a job, including how he landed his job at Linear and his previous role at Mode, and so much more. If you have a desire to build a company or a product that's as beloved as Linear, this episode will give you a ton of tactics and ways to change how you and your team operate. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Nan Yu. This episode is brought to you by Sinch, the customer communications cloud. Here's the thing about digital customer communications. Whether you're sending marketing campaigns, verification codes or account alerts, you need them to reach users reliably. That's where Sinch comes in. Over 150,000 businesses, including 8 of the top 10 largest tech companies globally, use Sinch's API to build messaging, email and calling into their products. And there's something big happening in messaging that product teams need to know about, rich communication services or RCS. Think of RCS as SMS 2.0. Instead of getting text from a random number, your users will see your verified company name and logo without needing to download anything new. It's a more secure and branded experience. Plus you get features like interactive carousels and suggested replies. And here's why this matters. US carriers are starting to adopt RCS. Sinch is already helping major brands send RCS messages around the world. And they're helping Lenny's Podcast listeners get registered first, before the rush hits the US market. Learn more and get started at sinch.com/lenny. That's sinch.com/lenny.
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