From project updates to accountability, Sierra moves as one company in Linear

As Sierra prepared for its next stage of growth, their team looked for a tool that could keep pace with their product development. Employees debated options in a Slack channel, with many advocating for tools they’d use at previous companies. Finally, Sierra cofounder and CEO Bret Taylor gave voice to the emerging consensus: “I think we should switch to Linear,” he wrote.

That was just the start. Adopting Linear meant designing workflows that lived up to Sierra’s values of trust and craftsmanship. One challenge was the company’s need to keep its Agent Development team, which works directly with hundreds of businesses, aligned with the product and engineering platform team that’s responsible for its core platform — Agent OS. The solution: a single system that could maintain project updates, and customer requests, sharing important context across the company.

In the months since making the decision, Sierra has wired its daily work into Linear. Today, Linear serves as the operating system of the company. Project updates in Linear now ripple through Slack, dashboards, and slides celebrating wins at all-hands meetings. Meanwhile, customer requests logged in Linear shape both the work of agent development and what the platform team builds. As a result — despite the company’s hyper growth — everyone understands what they’re building, why they’re building it, and how the work is progressing.

“I think in a lot of orgs you probably have a choice between moving fast and moving with care. Linear helps us have both,” said Zack Reneau-Wedeen, head of product at Sierra.

Project updates, everywhere⁠

Many people on Sierra’s agent development teams had used Linear at previous employers and were the quickest to adopt it. The core platform side had a longer experimentation period. They were used to organizing work at the team level, posting Friday team updates in Slack channels. That approach didn’t sync cleanly with the project-based approach of the agent development team, so over the course of a few cycles, they reorganized their work around projects and initiatives. That gave the entire engineering and product org a common language for sharing progress.

“We don’t want to know what individuals did that week—we want to know what was accomplished in service of which projects,” said Kevin Ingleman, the engineer who managed the core platform Linear migration.

The move to project updates unified the two sides of Sierra’s engineering org. Today the rule is simple: if it’s not in Linear, it doesn’t exist. Once a week, engineers log their updates. Each update flows into its project’s Slack channel, where a scissors emoji syndicates it into #snippets, a central feed that Sierra’s founders read top to bottom.

Updates also cascade into spreadsheets and launch decks, and populate dashboards built on the Linear API, which are easy to create and extend with coding agents. The result is a system where updates become signals that highlight opportunities and risks, power launch reviews, and help shape what the company builds next.

“Simply by keeping your projects updated in Linear, you’re suddenly doing everything right in terms of participating in the operating system of the company. You’ll get flagged for help if your project is at risk, you’ll get input from the right people, and when you deliver you’ll get celebrated,” said Zack.

Customer Requests: “A single pane of glass”⁠

Each morning at 9am a Slack reminder prompts Sierra’s teams to triage new customer requests in Linear. Many of them come from the agent development team that talks directly with Sierra customers. The requests are routed to the correct project-level leads on the core platform team, helping shape their product road-map.

“A nice thing about Linear is we can roll up issues across different custom agents into core initiatives. It gives the core team more visibility into why these feature gaps matter,” said Andrew Kim, an operations lead.

The same intake system helps Sierra move as a cohesive organization in which all parts of the org are in clear communication.

“Customer requests serve as a single pane of glass that opens up visibility between platform and agent development teams,” said Natalie Meurer, who leads agent engineering at Sierra.

Dashboards and visibility⁠

On Mondays, Sierra’s product staff meeting runs off what they call the Product Circle spreadsheet. Project updates sync through the Linear API, so with a single refresh the spreadsheet repopulates with milestones, statuses, and next steps. That same sheet feeds automatically into Google Slides decks that are used for launch reviews.

“If it’s updated in Linear, it rolls forward automatically into the views everyone already consumes,” said Zack.

Those same signals flow into Slack: each customer deployment and each core product feature has its own channel. Every Friday, the latest updates roll up into red-yellow-green status posts that are read across the company.

“Everyone reads it and has full visibility into what’s going on,” said Andrew.

That dynamic extends beyond product and engineering. Linear’s polished, approachable UI encourages marketing, design, and other cross-functional teams to spend time in Linear, creating a tight interlock between all teams at Sierra.

“Linear is the source of truth for what we’re building, which allows marketing teams, designers—everyone cross-functionally—to stay up to date. By creating value in Linear, other teams want to come to Linear to observe and participate,” said Zack.

Workflows that build culture⁠

Sierra combines Linear’s built-in structures (projects as the organizing unit of work, customer requests as the basis for prioritizing bigger initiatives) with their own unique habits, like scissors-emoji syndication.

The approach works from the top down, as an embodiment of Sierra’s commitment to trust, craftsmanship and transparency. And it works from the bottom up, as a system people are motivated to participate in because the return on being active in Linear is immediate.

“The ROI of participating in the system is very positive for each engineer. If you keep your project up to date, it gets communicated to the right places, you’ll get flagged for help, and you’ll get input when you need it. By the time you launch, everyone is already familiar with what you’ve accomplished,” said Zack.