Pitching Linear

“Our current tool works fine”

This is the most common objection, and the hardest to counter, because it’s partially true. Your current tool does work, in the sense that issues get filed and sprints happen and reports get generated.

The problem is what you can’t see. When a tool is slow or frustrating, people find ways around it. They track work in spreadsheets, discuss priorities in Slack threads that disappear, or stop filing bugs because the overhead isn’t worth it. The tool still “works,” but it’s capturing a fraction of what’s actually happening.

Linear customers consistently see a 2x increase in reported issues and 5x more teammates creating issues after switching. That’s work that was always happening but never got recorded. The reporting that leadership relies on was built on incomplete data, and everyone quietly knew it.

So the conversation worth having with your team is less about whether the current tool works and more about how much goes untracked every week because using it feels like a chore.

“Switching right now would be too disruptive”

This concern comes from a good place. Engineering leaders are protecting their teams’ focus, and the last thing anyone wants is a weeks-long migration that derails a release.

But the disruption of switching is a one-time cost, while the disruption of staying (the daily friction, the slow loads, the workarounds) is a recurring one.

The practical reality is also less daunting than people expect. Linear offers two-way sync with Jira and GitHub Issues, so you can run both tools in parallel during a transition without duplicating effort. Oscar migrated 600 engineers from Jira in a single month.

The strongest thing you can do to ease this concern is suggest a pilot. Pick one or two teams, run them on Linear for four to six weeks, and let the results make the case. Brex did exactly this, proving Linear’s impact with a data-driven pilot.

“We’ve invested too much in our current setup”

The way product teams work looks nothing like it did two years ago. AI coding tools have accelerated how fast individuals can write and ship code, which puts enormous pressure on the systems that coordinate what gets built and when. Most existing setups try to absorb that pressure by adding more plugins, more integrations, more complexity on top of what was already there.

Linear was designed for a world where AI agents are assigned work alongside human teammates, where tasks flow from tools like Cursor and Sentry into the same views and workflows your team already uses.

When Opendoor moved from Jira to Linear, they treated the migration as an opportunity to rebuild around how they actually wanted to work. The question for your team is whether what you’ve built is equipped for the way you need to work now.

Coinbase and Block moved to Linear as a way to accelerate towards a more AI-native way of building products.

The best way to experience Linear is with your team.