Nan Yu (Linear): Inside How Linear Crafts Quality Products
Plus how to get hired at a great company like Linear as an early PM
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a deep dive on Linear, a company that has redefined what it means to craft quality software.
Nan Yu is Linear’s Head of Product and the first product manager that they ever hired. We had a great conversation about:
How Nan became the first PM at Linear
How Linear uses paid work trials to hire talent
The Linear process for crafting quality products
How to get a job at a great company like Linear
Let’s dive in.
How Nan became the first PM at Linear
Welcome Nan! Many people would love to work for a great startup like Linear. How did you become Linear’s first PM?
I think it’s important to get to know and stay in touch with good people.
I met the Linear team when they were just getting started. I gave the founders some feedback on their initial product and stayed in touch with them afterward.
A few years later, I was the VP of Product at Mode Analytics and the Linear team reached out to get feedback on their first analytics feature. That’s when we decided to work together.
I find it fascinating that you moved from product VP to become an IC PM at a startup. What made you take that bet?
I don’t see it as a downgrade. Look, fundamentally, your job is to manage the product, no matter how high on the PM hierarchy you are.
You should be judged by whether you made the right product decisions or not, not by how many people are in your org.
That’s what I like to hear! So what was the interview process like at Linear?
We approached it as a 3-4 month paid engagement for me to help Linear craft their analytics product. So it was more of a work trial than an interview loop. They brought me on full-time after the trial.
How Linear uses paid work trials to hire the best
That’s a great transition to talk about Linear’s hiring process. I believe that every new hire at Linear now has to do a work trial. How does that process work?
Yes, here’s how it works:
Before the trial. Work trials are expensive for everyone involved, so we still do an interview loop first. We look for multiple “strong yes” votes to proceed to a trial.
During the trial. Work trials are like paid consulting engagements. We define a week’s worth of work for the candidate and then embed them into our team. They have access to Slack, Figma, and of course, Linear to get their work done.
After the trial. Each member of the project team submits feedback separately and the hiring manager then decides whether to extend an offer. Again, we’re looking for multiple “strong yes” votes.
What’s the benefit of a work trial compared to a standard interview loop?
You learn so much more about the candidate during the trial that’s impossible to learn in a normal interview process.
All the best candidates prep for the typical interview questions ahead of time. So often, you’re just getting rehearsed answers.
Work trials give you a much better sense of how candidates identify customer problems, come up with solutions, and work with the team.
What’s a key trait that makes a candidate successful during a work trial?
The Linear team is fully remote and spread out over different time zones.
Candidates are often surprised that our Slack is way quieter than they expect because everyone on the team is fairly independent. So they need to have a lot of self-motivation and agency to complete the trial successfully.
Can you share some example work trial projects? Big companies take a week for onboarding alone so I’m curious how much work can be done in a week.
The timeline is indeed short. If you spend the first few hours on Monday onboarding and the presentation is in the middle of Friday, that’s only 3.5 days of actual work.
We try to give candidates projects that are uncomfortably doable in 3.5 days.
They’ll have to leave parts out, make trade-offs, and say, "I got to this part, it's working well enough to demonstrate the core concept, but here's the remaining plan for how I would polish this."
Example work trials include:
For an engineer, building a small feature
For a content marketer, writing a blog post and go-to-market plan
For a designer, designing a way to resolve comments
Our goal is for the trial to closely mimic a real project.
Linear’s process for crafting quality products
Linear has built a strong reputation for crafting quality products in the industry. As the first PM, what role do you play in helping the team achieve this?
I try to set the team up for success by:
Helping them understand the problem space
Identifying specific use cases from the field
I spend a lot of time with our customer support and sales teams to understand what our customers want and how they feel about our product. I use this feedback to paint a vivid picture of what the current customer situation is.
The truth is that every engineer and designer is a de-facto PM at Linear. They’re empowered to make product decisions themselves and I can play a supporting role when needed.
I think an anti-pattern that many companies fall into is having engineers and designers rely completely on PMs for product decisions.
We want to avoid that.
So it sounds like you paint a clear picture of the customer problem and then the solution is crafted by the designers and engineers?
Well, there are decisions at many levels of abstraction.
I try to define the problem space clearly and stay at the highest level possible for solutions. The rest of the team is empowered to own the detailed product decisions, with feedback from me along the way.
Another unique thing about Linear is there aren’t any pre-defined product teams. How does that work?