How Automattic migrated to Linear and unified its product teams

Automattic turned to Linear to improve visibility and coordination across its expansive organization. After migrating their whole 600-person Engineering, Product, and Design team to Linear, what they ended up gaining was a whole new way of building products—and far faster than they’d anticipated.

The change began in early 2025, spearheaded in part by two recent arrivals: VP of product Pedraum Pardehpoosh, who joined from Airbnb, and Director of Design Operations Cliona O’Sullivan, who had spent six years at Spotify. They perceived similar challenges at the twenty-year-old company.

Automattic’s challenges⁠

For Pardehpoosh, it was the absence of a unified product roadmap and limited visibility into what different parts of the company were building. For O’Sullivan, it was that her designers were working in silos, making it hard to allocate resources efficiently and leading to an inconsistent user experience across Automattic’s many products.

Together, and with help from a large cross-functional group, they planned to gradually move the company over to Linear with a small pilot to collect data and develop best practices followed by a wider rollout over a few months.

CEO sets the pace⁠

Then founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg got involved. He saw the enthusiasm among early teams and, at a company-wide all-hands in late March, announced it was all systems go. The plan for a slow rollout turned overnight into a full migration.

To keep the transition coordinated, Automattic formed a small Linear task force—nicknamed the Lanekeepers—with a handful of people from design ops, product ops, quality ops, and engineering. Using Linear’s import tools, they moved over thousands of GitHub issues in just a month, focusing on active work and leaving stale or closed issues behind. Linear’s customer team made the process feel straightforward, hosting office hours several times a week and jumping in directly as teams migrated their work.

The Lanekeepers also set clear expectations for timing. Every product, design, and engineering team in the WordPress-related ecosystem business unit was required to be up and running in Linear by the end of April.

“We gave people time, but we also set strict expectations,” said O’Sullivan.

Defining concepts⁠

Next, the Lanekeepers shifted from migrating issues to defining the structure of their new Linear workspace. They shared a short “Linear tips and tricks” guide, including basics like where to find your work each day, and concrete examples of how to label work and name teams so everyone was using the same language.

“You’re changing your UI to Linear, and you also have to change your way of working,” said Chief Quality Officer Lance Willett. “We started using clearer language and labels so anyone outside the inner workings could route things logically. That clarity was huge.”

Here’s how Automattic defined the core primitives in Linear:

Initiatives⁠

High-level business outcomes, such as improving the customer experience across WordPress.com or strengthening the WooCommerce ecosystem.

Projects⁠

Time-bound work supporting initiatives. For work that doesn’t neatly roll up to a strategic objective, like maintenance and ongoing improvements, they created a catch-all “business-as-usual” initiative.

Labels⁠

Tags for ownership, status, and releases. The Lanekeepers set clear rules for how to use them, giving everyone a shared language for how work moves through the company.

Teams⁠

Cross-functional groupings organized around product areas, rather than reporting lines. Each team serves as a container for all issues and projects tied to a product, giving design, engineering, and product management a shared view.

Building habits⁠

With this structure in place, the Lanekeepers turned to adoption, starting with the workflows people touch most often: triaging bugs, advancing projects, and managing support requests. The logic being that if people had a reason to be in Linear every day, new habits would follow.

“We focused on the things people interact with every day,” said Darren Ethier, a developer at WooCommerce. “We built clear processes around that so teams were almost forced into the new workflow.”

By early summer, only three months after Mullenweg had given the green light, Automattic was running these workflows company-wide in Linear.

What changed⁠

Today, more than 80% of Automattic employees use Linear on a weekly basis and the team is creating more than 12,000 issues per month.

Adopting Linear has improved coordination and velocity, including in the way Automattic addresses bugs. Bug reports now live in one place, helping engineers respond faster, reducing duplication, and giving leaders a clearer view of progress and quality. Automattic is now triaging 15-20 bugs per week to about 150 different engineers (averaging 4 bugs per user for a good load distribution).

Automattic is currently fine-tuning its Linear setup, “making Linear work for us,” said O’Sullivan. Teams are using Linear data to track release cadence and spot where work slows down, while shared views are helping product leads see progress across products.