How Linear Turned Craft Into a B2B Growth Strategy

Linear is an opinionated project management platform designed for high-performing software development and product teams. It was built as an opposition to JIRA, the “most hated software” ever created. In the survey by Gergely Orosz, Jira ended up as the most-disliked tool with more negative mentions than the next four combined. This happens a lot with enterprise B2B software because the decision-makers and users are different people. C-level executives decide to buy the tool that everyone else has to use, often for budgetary reasons. It’s how people end up with Microsoft Teams instead of Slack even if everyone despises it a little bit. Linear’s founders had encountered this issue at Airbnb, Coinbase, and Uber. They believed that project-management software had been designed around bureaucracy rather than the people building products. They discussed the idea every Wednesday for roughly a year while still employed. In March 2019, they quit their jobs, built a working prototype in about…