Blog|Updates from the Linear team

“Projects” was one of the core themes of our 2022 roadmap planning session and we spent a lot of time discussing what features we should work on to meaningfully improve this part of the Linear experience. Project Updates wasn’t part of our initial list of things to build. It slowly emerged as a problem space that we should tackle as we were building other things. Here’s what happened.

The systematic thinking in our industry is that settings are the result of design failure. As designers, our goal is to create product experiences that don’t require any adjustment by the user. So offering customization options is often seen as a failure to make firm product decisions. I think there is a misunderstanding about what settings really are.

2021 has been an exciting and productive year for us here at Linear. We look back on a year of progress and momentum with dozens of new features, hundreds of fixes and improvements, and thousands of completed issues.

We launched Linear exactly one year ago to help high-performing teams who wanted a better way to build software. Linear is fast, effortless, and simple to use. It streamlines core aspects of product team workflows so that they can focus on the work that matters while our tool does the rest.

We knew how to code, design and ship but we didn’t know how to prioritize effectively, set meaningful goals, or keep the momentum up week after week. While at the very beginning this is not that critical. It becomes more when you get to the stage of having a product and user to support. You need some structure to keep making meaningful progress and not going around in circles.

Today, we’re announcing that we’ve raised $13M in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital and a slew of new product updates aimed at re-envisioning the principles and practices of building and continue developing the best in class tool for teams to create software.

We recently added contextual menus to Linear. This makes the app faster and easier to use for people who prefer their mouse.

One small thing that you won’t see or think about but will hopefully *feel* is a detail we designed into how sub-menus work.

At Linear, we believe software can feel magical. Well designed tools and practices encourage momentum and level up execution in our teams. Linear is now open for sign ups

A changelog is a simple way to communicate your progress and culture and celebrate wins. It can be a quick way to align your team to focus on creating user value.

At Linear, we are creating software for startups and companies who look to create impact. We believe creators should focus on the work they create, not manually tracking their work. Managers should spend their time prioritizing and giving direction, not bugging their teams for updates. Running the process shouldn’t sap your team’s energy and come in the way of creating.