Retool
Retool is pioneering a new way of building internal software. Linear keeps their teams customer-focused.
Retool is the platform for building bespoke internal tools. Ambitious teams at Stripe, Amazon and Pinterest use Retool to streamline their internal operations. For Retool, shipping high-quality software is non-negotiable – it’s how their customers achieve operational excellence.
As the company scaled, the team needed to balance new product work with maintaining the stability of business-critical features. To rein in issue sprawl and stay customer-focused, Retool adopted Linear.
Other tools felt like tons of tech debt in your face. It was weirdly hard to do things. I've never run into that with Linear. It feels more like software I want to use.
Before Linear, I was bogged down by legacy tools - writing SQL queries just to get basic views and clicking through multiple steps to create projects. With Linear, everything is dramatically faster. I can quickly review tickets and understand my team's progress at a glance. The difference in speed is my primary reason for using Linear.
With Linear's ability to auto-detect and quickly merge duplicate issues, Retool managed to prune their substantial backlog. Linear's auto-closing feature systematically prevents the backlog from growing unwieldy going forward.
I like how Linear isn't some agnostic tool that lets you do everything any way you want. Their opinionated features like auto-closing tickets consistently prove valuable–teams report cleaner backlogs, fewer stale issues, and better visibility into actual work. As a leader, I can confidently enable these features knowing they've been proven successful across thousands of engineering teams.
Triage automatically assigns incoming issues to the appropriate Retool engineer. And Linear’s Slack integration keeps key stakeholders informed on progress, giving them time to prepare customer communications or send updates upstream.
We’re able to get back to users faster when we fix bugs and ship features thanks to the GitHub automation, which sends a notification once a PR is merged. We also use Linear comments extensively. It’s the place where people have conversations and share updates — and we point to Linear as the source of truth.
Retool engineers and their managers keep larger bodies of work on track with project milestones. Every quarter, teams self-assign a project, divide up the work, and drive toward specific goals – each contributing to a superior Retool user experience.
Milestones are my favorite feature. They are a good push for the team, helping us plan a sprint of work and see the progress graph over time. Just seeing how the team works through a set of tickets and the velocity they’re moving at is motivating.
Working in this way has set a new standard for Retool. Instead of trying to manage and execute a massive repository of tasks, milestones naturally force teams to group and prioritize new components, bugs, and enhancements – without letting important customer requests they may need to address in the future slip through the cracks.
It’s easy to separate out a chunk of stuff we care about right now while continuing to file things we’re going to work on later. It’s also a good check-in. Should all of this actually be on our list? Do we move stuff out?
The combination of a clear workspace, clear ownership, and clear to-dos has Retool engineers moving at a higher velocity, shipping the features customers need to manage their internal operations with confidence.
At Retool, we’re focused on quality and Linear has helped us form a definition of what ‘quality’ means. We literally have a project in Linear called ‘Quality,’ and every engineer on the team is taking one roughly four-hour task every week that improves the quality of Retool – and it’s directly sourced from customer feedback that lands in Linear.