Tips for joining your team on Linear
Guidance for team members joining a Linear workspace.
Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products, intended for high performance engineering and product teams. It’s fast, a joy to use, intuitively designed, and without the feature bloat that makes tools clunky.
If your team already operates on Linear, you probably want to learn how to navigate already established workflows. Here are our top tips for getting familiar with your workspace and setting yourself up for success:
Learn the core concepts
The core concepts provide a basic understanding of Linear's design so you can navigate through your Linear workspace efficiently.
Get familiar with your team’s workflow
When you first log in to your Linear workspace, go to the Teams page (top left sidebar) to see how your company is organized. Once you join a team, you’ll see it listed in your sidebar for quick navigation.
Explore your team’s settings by clicking the three dots next to the team name to open the contextual model, and select Team settings.
This is the best way to get familiar with how your team operates, including:
- Customized workflow statuses
- Established estimates system
- Auto-closing and auto-archiving thresholds for “stale” issues
- Templates for standardizing the creation of issues, projects, and docs
- Cycle settings (aka, Linear’s version of sprints)
Configure notifications and manage your inbox
By default, you’ll be subscribed to updates on issues you are assigned to or that you interact with in a meaningful way. All issue notifications go to your Linear Inbox, where you can respond, mark them as read, and “snooze” them - much like an email inbox.
To configure desktop push notifications, personal Slack notifications, and email digests, go to Preferences -> My Account -> Notifications. We highly recommend connecting notifications to your Slack workspace!
Practice keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts are frequently used and loved by our power users. They let you control all of the common (and much of the less common) functionality of Linear and make the application a lot faster to use. For instance, ? brings up the help window, / opens search, and c creates an issue.
The most important shortcut to remember is CMD + K , which pulls up the full set of available commands. If you want to do something, but aren’t sure how, try searching the command menu.
Favorite your go-to issue and project Views
Any list of issues or projects in Linear is considered a “view”. These can be filtered by underlying metadata, the display customized, and then saved for future reference.
Explore existing views to learn how your team organizes and categorizes work. Find team-specific examples in the “Views” section of your team, and all personal views and views that span across multiple teams in the “Views” section under Workspace (top right sidebar).
If you find or build a view that you want to reference often, favorite it for easy navigation. If you find yourself with a long list of favorites, create folders to organize them in your sidebar.
Check how teams are running issue intake
We know it can be nerve wracking to start creating issues without guidance. Here are a few tools teams might be using to manage their issue intake process:
- Triage is an optional team setting to screen any issues coming in from other teams. This offers receiving teams a chance to review, update, and prioritize issues before they are added to their backlog.
- Issue templates standardize the inputs for common issue types, such as a “bug report” or “feature request”. Check the Templates section of your team settings for team-specific use cases, and the Templates section of your workspace settings for templates that are used across teams.
- Integrations can be used to turn reports/requests from other tools into Linear issues, and then sync updates and comments bi-directionally. Common use cases include support integrations (Front, Zendesk, Intercom, etc) and Slack. Filter your teams issues by “external source” to see if any of these options are being used, or check the Integrations page in workspace settings.
Join our Slack Community
In addition to our docs and support inbox (support@linear.app), our Slack community is a great place to ask questions, engage with the Linear team, keep up to date on new feature announcements, and learn from other users. Join us!