Why Linear Builds Software With Strong Opinions
Linear’s co-founder Jori Lallo and Chief Operating Officer Cristina Cordova describe their product philosophy as “opinionated software.” The idea is simple: rather than offering a blank canvas where every team invents its own workflow, the tool should guide users toward a single, proven default process. “We design it so that there’s one really good way of doing things,” says Lallo. “Flexible software lets everyone invent their own workflows, which eventually creates chaos as teams scale.”
That stance grew out of frustration with legacy tools that siloed workflows at high-growth companies like Airbnb and Coinbase. The founding team wanted an issue tracker and project management tool that mirrors how startups actually work. The result is a product purpose-built for product development teams, not a general-purpose utility for every discipline.
Atom-Level Opinions, Bigger-Picture Flexibility
In practice, Linear is most opinionated at the atomic level: issue properties, labels, and due dates have clear defaults. As the scope widens to concepts like projects, the team takes more cues from customer feedback, recognizing that every company is structured differently.
The team also avoids jargon and steep learning curves. Units of work like “projects” and “teams” are universal, and there is no handbook required to get started. “No one wants to waste time nitpicking the nuances of a process,” says Lallo. “We try to reduce the amount of fiddling around with processes and get you into building things.”
Strategic Product Debt
Linear distinguishes product debt from tech debt. Tech debt, in their view, is simply bad code. Product debt, on the other hand, is a deliberate borrowing against quality—narrowing a feature’s scope or optimizing for the short term while knowing interest will come due in the form of customer feedback or rework.
Settings is a prime example. Over five years, the team has only ever added functionality to the settings experience—features, preferences, and sections—without rethinking it holistically. “The interest rate on it has been pretty low, and we can pay it back over a longer period of time,” says Lallo. “Shortcuts might be perceived as lower quality, but our version of that is more about decreasing scope,” adds Cordova.
Strong Opinions Can Change
Being opinionated does not mean being rigid. “We’re a startup, so we don’t build software by a recipe,” says Lallo. Many teams resist changing the user experience out of fear of pushback, but Linear embraces iteration. “I would hate Linear to be in a position where we can never take something away or change certain things,” he says. “It’s natural that there’s going to be a little bit of pushback.” When making disruptive changes, the team’s approach is to give users the information and tools to understand the change, with a north star of shipping work they are proud of.
Developing Your Own Point of View
Popular frameworks like OKRs are not a starting point that works for everyone. “Many people try to adapt things from the industry that might not actually be applicable to them, or they might not know the potential downside,” says Lallo. “They were developed at places that are bigger and growing faster than most companies, so you need to try to understand what’s behind them and adapt pieces of them.”
For teams looking to develop their own methodology, the advice is to lean on experience but stay experimental. In high-growth environments, doing and experimenting tends to be more instructive than theorizing.
