Render

At Render, engineers take turns doing customer support. We'll answer questions in our Slack channels and email users who report in bugs and feature requests. Often, an issue will come up from a user that has been reported before but we haven't gotten around to implementing it yet. The common impulse is to jump in and fix the problem they're having, but it's more helpful to be able to pause and check Linear to see the state of the issue. There's usually a reason we haven't fixed it yet and we'll see that in the description or comments. We make better decisions because the information is updated and in one place.

It's also been helpful that members of our team outside of engineering feel comfortable in Linear. We can share issues without friction and they can use the tool without much onboarding. This has been helpful in planning meetings, where it's so much easier to throw in a link to a Linear issue to share context than to explain the background information verbally.

That's another thing I appreciate about Linear: how easy it is to be onboarded between the UI and simple terminology. Projects, labels, and teams are just projects, labels, and teams. Anyone who opens Linear can understand it quickly. Linear keeps everything in one place in a way that's easy for people to reason with, and I think that's what an issue tracker is for in the first place.