Kaviyo boosts visibility and velocity with Linear

Everyone at Klaviyo wanted to better understand what everyone else at the 5,000-person public company was doing. This included members of Klaviyo’s 98 different teams who wanted to know how their work supported the overall roadmap, and it included leaders who wanted quick, reliable updates on the company’s progress.

Earlier this year, Klaviyo solved both challenges by switching to Linear. Linear provides Klaviyo with a structured planning and execution environment that facilitates visibility across every dimension of the organization—including agents that Klaviyo is using inside Linear to quickly resolve bug reports and answer feature requests that previously had languished for months.

“Before Linear, people would ask me, ‘why are we doing this? Since switching to Linear, I’m not getting that question anymore,” said Christina Valente, director of product ops at Klaviyo.

Jira was too fragmented⁠

Before Linear, Klaviyo’s work was spread across Jira, Google Sheets, Google Docs, Productboard, Slack, forms, and support channels. The way they used Jira was ad hoc across teams, with different statuses, labels, and workflows. This made it hard to track progress at the company level.

“I’ve been working on Jira for 20 years and I’d never seen it like this before,” Valente said. “There was no consistency across teams in how they were using it.”

One operating model with Linear⁠

Linear gave Klaviyo a shared structure for planning and execution. Kalyvio’s 98 teams now use consistent statuses, aligned project workflows, and a common hierarchy that connects company priorities to day-to-day work.

Klayvio uses initiatives in Linear to capture objectives and key results, projects to represent features teams are building, and issues to track the work required to deliver them, including user stories, technical requirements, bugs, investigations, and design tasks.

With planning and execution in one system, teams can better see how their work connects to the roadmap, and leaders can assess daily progress against quarterly goals.

“From where I sit, that is all now very clear,” Valente said. “You’re able to provide leadership with a clear view of everything that’s going to be executed in this quarter.”

Linear Agent is also reducing the time required for routine product operations work. Project updates that used to take Valente 30 to 45 minutes now take about five, because the relevant context already lives in Linear.

“Linear has all the context, so it’s much easier now to come in and have the agent write the status update,” said Valente.

A better bug loop⁠

While using Jira, bug reporting had been one of the hardest processes for Klaviyo to manage. They’d needed to implement custom integrations across Jira and Jira Service Management, which made it difficult to follow a bug as it moved from support intake to engineering triage to resolution.

With Linear, Klaviyo has simplified that process, boosting visibility and velocity. Support agents can now submit bugs through Zendesk into Linear, where Triage Intelligence helps route them to the right team. Within about 30 days of adopting Linear, bugs were being assigned more accurately, giving Klaviyo a clearer way to track SLAs while reducing the time engineers spend sorting incoming reports.

“Triage Intelligence within Linear is really incredible and now we’re meeting our SLAs with customer support teams,” said Valente.

Agents are accelerating product velocity⁠

By making work consistent, visible, and legible across the company, Linear provides agents with the context they need to be useful. That context is helping teams at Klaviyo move faster from customer request to product change.

Recently, one of Klaviyo’s biggest customers reported an issue through support. Previously, the request would have ended up on a product board or been slotted into some future sprint. With Linear, it moved almost immediately into production.

The request came in through the Linear-Zendesk integration, was routed to the right team, and reviewed by a PM. From there, the PM used the Linear-Cursor integration to make the change directly. Within three business days, Klaviyo had improved the customer experience.

“Linear helps us accelerate our work,” Valente said. “It gives teams and agents the context they need to move faster and work better.”