Linear – 2021 Wrapped

Building software products is like going on a journey.

When you are on a journey, you typically look ahead. You look at the ambitious goals you set for yourself. The mountain peak you want to climb. The next milestone you want to reach.

Looking ahead keeps you on the right track. It gives you direction and serves as a reminder for why you went on your journey in the first place. But every once in a while it's worth it to stop for a second and to take a look back.

Looking back helps you to see all the progress you have made on your journey so far. It gives you a sense of accomplishment. Sometimes it's worth looking back just to enjoy the view.

At Linear, we are on a journey to bring back the magic to software. Our mountain peak is building tools for the next generation of high-impact companies - so that they can be more successful on their respective journeys.

But today, we are not here to talk about where we are going. We want to stop for a second and take a look back. We already publish regular changelogs about new improvements and updates (and we would encourage you to do the same) - so today we'll look back at our entire 2021 journey. The last 347 days to be exact.

2021 has been an exciting and productive year for us. A year full of progress and momentum. We shipped 39 changelog updates featuring 58 new features and 740 fixes and improvements over the last twelve months. Highlights include our integrations for Front, Intercom & Zendesk; roadmap timeline, split inbox, issue triage, project documents and new filters, SOC 2 compliance, and many, many other new features.

We look back on 56 projects this year. Each of them is like a small mountain peak we had to climb on our journey to get to where we are today. The graph above features the ten largest projects we worked on this year - our 2021 summits, so to speak. Their height is determined by their number of issues weighted by their respective estimates.

We created our first issue of the year on Sat, Jan 02 2021 at 10:59:31 GMT. Since then, the team created 4,387 more issues. Luckily, we launched an updated issue creation UI earlier this year which made this process way faster.

We marked 2,489 issues as complete. That's an average of 7.17291 completed issues per day. Nov 10, 2021 was our most productive day with 45 issues marked as completed.

Of the 2489 issues we completed this year, 518 were bugs that we fixed.

Our users sent us hundreds of feature requests - many of them via the Linear Slack community which has 3,306 members.

5 new team members joined us during our journey this year, bringing the Linear team to a total of 13 people. We are a fully-remote company and currently work across 11 cities across 7 timezones within GMT +8 to -2.

No great journey has ever been completed without sufficient energy supplies. That's why we cook or bake together over Zoom at least once a quarter. In 2021, we organized 5 team bake offs which included everything from Enchiladas to Japanese roll cakes.

Looking back at everything we worked on in 2021 gets us even more excited about what's coming in 2022. We have an ambitious roadmap ahead of us with a lot of exciting mountain peaks to climb. And we are looking for pioneering and passionate people to join us on that journey.

If your 2022 goals include taking up a new professional challenge, you should consider joining us.