Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO)
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My belief is that like any domain or industry, the more it matters, the more the design matters, what happens is like whenever there's like 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 like super well designed necessarily because they are the first, but then like as you built the 100 like 1000 like different email clients, any email client now has to be like pretty good to be even considered like reason of like an email client, it's like that the bar is so high. So I think like today, it's almost like a very basic thing now, pretty much from the very beginning, you need like pretty high level design of people to even like pay attention or consider you seriously. Today, my guest is Kari Sarnan. Kari was the founding designer Coinbase principal designer at Airbnb co-founder of two previous startups. And most recently is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, which I am fairly confident is the fastest growing and most beloved issue tracking tool in the world. And something that a growing number of product teams are using to build their own product. Kari and his team are building their company and their product in a really unique way with a huge focus on craft and quality, no A/B tests, no metric space goals, instead a focus on tastes and opinions. Also, no durable cross functional teams, instead teams assemble around project and then disperse once it's done. Also, they have just one product manager as a head of product. And that's it. In our conversation, Kari shares how he built a culture around quality and craft, how he makes trade offs, and how he operationalizes quality and thoughtfulness, where design can be a differentiator and competing against incumbents. We talk about something called the linear method of building product, which is big on building opinionated software, working in consistent cycles amongst other principles. We also get into linear is unique hiring approach, which involves a paid work trial, where candidate work alongside a team for a number of days, instead of just having an interview. Also, a glimpse into how linear got their first 10 customers, found product market fit and scaled their growth engine. There is so much golden's episode. I'm very excited for you to hear it. With that, I bring you Kari Saranen after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Mercury, who I also happened to use for my business checking account. I've tried a lot of business banks, and there is nothing even close to the experience you get with Mercury, and moved cash over from another bank and literally took less than half an hour to set up the account and wire money over at no cost. They kind of make you want to use the site more often, which I've never felt with another banking site. Mercury is banking engineered for the startup journey, a modern solution to help your company become the best version of itself. And Mercury isn't just a place to hold and send money. It's software built to help you scale with
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