Scale
Scale accelerates AI development. Linear supports Scale’s high velocity.
Scale AI is laying the groundwork for AI innovation, serving as the hub for building, deploying, and evaluating AI. Its products have pushed the boundaries of AI, supplying the data needed to train breakthrough models.
All of Scale’s teams are highly collaborative and require cross-functional teamwork. Team leads in the engineering, product, and design (EPD) organization wanted to improve their ability to track their own team's progress and gain insights into the workloads of other teams. This challenge highlighted the opportunity for a more efficient solution.
With a growing backlog of tickets, three teams independently began to explore Linear as a potential solution. Once word got out about the separate initiatives, the teams joined forces, piloted Linear, and it quickly gained momentum across the entire company. Today, much of Scale’s workforce is using Linear to manage product workflows across their organization.
My team instantly thought Linear was great. There were no grumblings. The only conversations we had were about getting enough seats to give people access.
We planned for 50 seats initially, but suddenly, hundreds more signed up. It was a classic grassroots story – other teams heard we were using Linear and wanted to use it too. Now, we’ve switched all of EPD and Ops over.
Scale is able to leverage Linear’s high-performance architecture, intuitive design, and features specifically made for optimizing core engineering workflows like managing feature requests and bug reports. Triage enables each team to set a rotating schedule of ownership for monitoring incoming issues. Customized SLAs hold team members accountable for closing issues on time, with notifications to keep them on track and status updates sent directly to Slack.
Triage is by far my favorite feature. It’s been a game changer for our team, especially managers and stakeholders. They can see how many new tickets have come in and whether someone’s assessed them. It guarantees someone’s eyes will get on each issue. I haven’t seen something like this in any other tool.
Linear’s thoughtful, fit-to-purpose design stood out as a core driver for Scale’s decision to switch. Every issue in Linear is tied to a single project, team, and engineer, making it clear who owns what. Three months into using Linear, one of the teams improved bug resolution time by 52%.
Every month that we’ve used Linear, we’ve been able to find and report more bugs and fix them faster. Good product design is nudging a user into making the right decision. Cycles, for example, are immensely opinionated, but it’s changed the way I think about software engineering. It’s far easier to put something in a cycle than it is to put it in the backlog, which means it's going to show up in someone's to-do list rather than get lost in the ether. More than 9 times out of 10, Linear will make that good decision for us.
A centralized workspace provides Scale teams with the necessary visibility to respond quickly and adapt to changing needs. Linear Initiatives surface project updates and highlight which projects are at risk. A more detailed look at at-risk projects in Insights can uncover scope creep or blockers.
Initiatives is like a homepage for me. I see what each of my pods is working on and can dive down into the project level or issue level if needed. I also love the progress bar showing closed issues and all the other graphs. I don’t know how I’d be able to oversee multiple teams any other way.
Linear doesn’t feel like a ticketing management system. It just blends into our workflow. When I open up Insights, I can see the distribution of issues across the team, the statuses and understand what’s going on. It’s the heartbeat of my team.
In partnering with Linear, Scale has the fast, intuitive software it needs to accelerate the abundance of data for its customers.