“One roadmap”: How Brex consolidated their fragmented planning
Brex has established itself as a leader in financial services and software, serving over 30,000 customers – including 150 public companies and countless startups across 120+ countries – with its corporate cards, expense management, and banking services.
“Question every past decision and rebuild from first principles, with a laser focus on product excellence and customer experience.” This bold vision outlined on the company’s blog by CEO Pedro Franceschi set the stage for Brex's ambitious transformation dubbed “Brex 3.0.” At its core, this vision recognized that achieving excellence requires exceptional tools.
Our tools shape our work, and if the tools you use are poor, don't be surprised when the work itself reflects that.
For Brex, the pursuit of excellence meant consolidating to one roadmap and reimagining their product, design, and engineering workflows. They needed tools that could increase the velocity and quality of how they build products, while providing visibility at all organizational levels.
The challenge: Tool sprawl and roadmap fragmentation
As Brex scaled its team to serve the growing demand for the product, the company found themselves managing an increasingly complex workflow across disconnected systems. Jira for engineering, Atlas for high-level project tracking, Monday.com for non-technical teams, and countless spreadsheets attempting to tie everything together.
There was no single source of truth. Finding project updates and understanding progress meant navigating a maze of threads, channels, tickets, and different tools.
If left unchecked, fragmentation of this kind begins to actively undermine velocity and a company’s ability to execute on their vision. Without a consolidated view of work, leadership can’t make informed prioritization decisions. Engineers spend valuable time navigating internal tools rather than building features. Product teams struggle to communicate roadmaps to stakeholders. Brex spotted this ahead of time and moved quickly to avoid it.
For Pedro Franceschi’s “Brex 3.0” vision to succeed, the company needed to solve two problems simultaneously: A single tool that engineers would embrace, and one that could also unify their fragmented roadmaps.
The solution: “One Roadmap”, powered by Linear
Brex developed an initiative they called “One Roadmap.” A vision to consolidate their fragmented planning into a single, unified view of all product development work across the company.
“We're trying to move away from dozens of product teams with their own roadmaps, to one central company roadmap.”, said Nicolás Carey, Director of Product & Design. “This single source of truth allows us to gain a comprehensive understanding of activities across all levels of the business, enabling us to make more effective decisions and ultimately deliver exceptional experiences to our users.”
Brex's leadership recognised that meaningful visibility begins with engagement. Accurate data on product development progress, essential for high-quality insights and reporting, comes from tools that engineers enjoy using and consistently update.
But most project management tools think about this the wrong way. They prioritize reporting over creation, burdening engineers with slow interfaces and mandatory fields that add little value. This complexity often leads to frustration and workarounds, fragmenting information and hindering visibility.
Linear takes a different approach by focusing on the daily experience for engineers. By keeping things simple, and crafting workflows specifically for product teams, Linear is a tool engineers actually enjoy using. For Brex, this solved the root problem – engagement. When teams like using their software, they keep it updated. Accurate data is the foundation of good reporting.
The most telling thing was that Linear was the only piece of software in this domain where engineers actually enjoyed using it and keeping it updated.
The pilot: Proving it works
In April 2024, Brex launched a pilot program with Linear to build a business case backed by data before making the decision to switch.
Their primary objective was to find a tool engineers enjoyed using every day. They understood that better visibility, process improvements, and establishing a singular roadmap could only happen after solving for adoption.
Before launching the pilot, Brex conducted a survey to establish baseline metrics on engagement, satisfaction, ease of use, and team understanding of their connection to the product roadmap. They asked their team a set of questions about their existing tool, asking them to rank their response on a scale from 1-5. They repeated the same survey after the pilot to see how Linear stacked up against the initial responses.
Here's what they learned:
Engineers picked up Linear quickly with no formal training. The effect this had on our ability to execute and collaborate at velocity while maintaining a high quality bar cannot be overstated.
Looking ahead: Accelerating product development with Linear
By reducing tool sprawl and consolidating to “One Roadmap,” Brex gained clarity into their development process, making decision-making more effective at all levels in the business. This enhanced focus allowed teams to prioritize with confidence and accelerate delivery – translating to an improved experience for users, and quantifiable results for Brex. In a recap of progress in 2024, Brex reported, “Revenue growth accelerated almost 3x in 2024, net revenue retention is up more than 15 points, while burn rate is down almost 70%.”
Brex’s enterprise segment in particular has thrived, growing 80% this last year with net revenue retention exceeding 140%, as highlighted in their February 2025 report. Brex now serves customers representing an estimated market cap of over $2.9 trillion, compared to just $200 billion three years ago.
Linear has become a key tool as Brex continues to raise the bar on product quality and innovation while increasing the pace of customer acquisition — setting the stage for their future IPO.