- High Output Work
- Posts
- ☄️ Linear's Product Velocity Playbook
25 Engineers.
$1.25B valuation.
15,000+ customers.
Only $35k spent on marketing…ever.
If you work in, with, or around product teams then you’re likely familiar with how almost every engineer seems to love Linear and their shipping velocity.
Linear ships large features quickly, small improvements often, and maintains an absurdly high product quality bar with just 25 engineers.
The software is used by OpenAI, Scale AI, and Perplexity while maintaining 280% profit growth.
In their early days, you could see what shipped each week in their changelog.
On top of all this growth, only 2 people have ever left the company.
They recently raised $82M at a $1.25B valuation, so I thought it’d be a good time to deep dive into what’s made them successful at building systems that let them operate at such a high level.
Small teams own outcomes
Linear has one Head of Product.
Instead of traditional product managers, everyone else forms atomic teams.
1 designer + 2 or 3 engineers who own a feature from concept to launch.
These teams aren't permanent; they form around a project, ship it, then dissolve.
No standing meetings or handoffs. Only complete accountability.
The atomic team formula:
Maximum 3 people (complexity explodes beyond this)
One project owner makes the final decisions
A fixed timeline with a variable scope (ship something valuable in 2-6 weeks)
Avoid collaborating across timezones within atomic teams as much as possible
Linear isn’t the only high output culture to use small teams either:
Basecamp validates this approach by keeping meetings to usually no more than 4 people.
Amazon's Jeff Bezos created the "two-pizza rule" for keeping teams small enough to feed with two pizzas.
TaskRabbit restructured into eight cross-functional pods and saw immediate results.
TLDR — fewer stakeholders = faster velocity.
Automate intake
Linear's team uses its own product every day.
This means they know exactly where the pain points are.
And it makes it easier to build a system that moves customer feedback to the right team.
Linear's triage engine does it based on predefined rules.
Issues get labeled, prioritized, and assigned without human intervention.
And their technical stack eliminates manual coordination:
Duplicate detection using AI - Similar issues are automatically flagged using vector embeddings (a way to mathematically represent how similar text is)
Real-time sync - WebSocket architecture means instant updates across everything
Triage automation - Rules update team, status, assignee, and priority automatically
Linear's Asks API transforms Slack conversations into properly categorized issues.
Support tickets from Zendesk automatically become Linear tasks with full customer context attached.
This allows them to create a magical experience for their user.
Because they have built a system that ensures the right people in the company are working on the right problem.
Customer-first development
Linear never guesses what to build next.
They've built a direct pipeline from customer conversations to development work.
When engineers close an issue, customers get notified in the original support conversation thread.
Their feedback system operates on three levels:
Immediate routing: Customer requests become Linear issues with full context
Volume-based prioritization: Multiple customers requesting the same feature automatically increases priority
Bi-directional sync: Customers see progress updates without engineers managing communication
The pattern works because it eliminates the translation layer between customer needs and development priorities.
Build feedback integration systems with the goal of eliminating the delay between feedback and action.
Cultural systems scale quality
Linear maintains a zero-bug policy.
Not "fix bugs eventually" but literally zero bugs in production. They achieve this by making it part of their identity and building systems around it:
Paid work trials - Candidates work on real projects for 1-5 days
Company-wide release candidates - Everyone (actually) tests before public launch
Engineer-led projects - Technical decisions made by people writing the code
High visibility across the team for any bug that’s flagged internally or by customers
And it’s working — the team’s pride in their product has led to a 96% retention rate.
The pattern: make quality everyone's responsibility, not one person's job.
The bottom line
Linear has been profitable for 2+ years with more cash in the bank than they've raised.
How? They’ve focused on eliminating and automating low-leverage work, which has allowed them to focus entirely on building a best-in-class product.
Linear proved that 25 engineers can outship teams 10x their size. The constraint isn't talent or resources, it's the systems that let talent operate at full capacity.
Until Next Time,
David Lobo,
Head of Growth, Workmate
Sources
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