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We believe that building the best product requires three things: great builders, autonomy, and context. But having all three is really hard, especially as you grow a team. Autonomy gets traded for an increase in context, by adding synchronous meetings or project managers. Context gets lost at the expense of maintaining autonomy, as decisions and data get lost in a sea of tools.

As we passed a product team of 10, and a company of 25, we started to lose context. A feature might live partially in Github, Trello, Dropbox, Slack, and Figma, and they rarely stay in sync. For us, context was losing to autonomy and we needed a solution.

We searched every tool to find a way to bring balance back to autonomy and context. You name it, we tried it.

When we tried Linear, we knew we’d found something magical. Every team has its own needs with its own process, and somehow Linear manages to be flexible enough to solve for all of them without being confusing. High level context is captured in Projects, long term context is captured in Roadmaps, low level context is captured in Issues, and short term context is captured in Cycles. Any teammate can zoom in to a specific timeline or part of a project, or zoom out to understand the long term plans.

Linear might sound on the surface like tools you’re used to, and in some ways it is. You’ll instantly recognize almost every aspect of it so it’s easy to get started. But like any really good tool, it’s a step function increase in value by offering just the right primitives with just enough flexibility, while avoiding busy work and remaining simple to use.