Announcing Linear
Introducing the more enjoyable and efficient way to manage software development with linear.app
Managing software development and design well is one of the most critical activities of any product company. Prioritizing the right ideas, tracking roadmaps and maintaining product quality can mean the difference between the success and death of a company.
This is why issue, bug and project management tools are some of the oldest and most popular types of software created. Many of the leading tools on the market were created over a decade ago and their concepts have not evolved much since their inception, whereas our expectations, technologies, and software development practices have changed greatly.
Our founding team has designed, delivered and scaled software at some of the fastest growing tech companies in the world — Uber, Airbnb, and Coinbase. We have witnessed first hand how companies and product teams grow from one to thousands of people, experienced the pain of triaging thousands of bugs and the confusion and waste created by misaligned roadmaps. We grew frustrated by how slow, lacking and disconnected these the tools were from today’s practices. For example, it is rare it is to find top product companies in the Silicon Valley that fully embrace Scrum or Agile, yet most of the tools in the market seem to centered around these methodologies. Many companies have adapted their own, more lightweight version of these processes, yet tooling hasn’t followed.
This is why we decided to start Linear. We wanted to re-envision a new standard for creating and maintaining software and share our thinking and tooling with all companies. Our vision is to create a more enjoyable and efficient way to manage software development.
Here’s how we’re going about doing it:
- Deliver a great UX, focusing on speed and efficiency. These tools are supposed to be used multiple times a day and help you do your work. Our goal is to make the experience frictionless, simple and fast so that it doesn’t get in your way.
- Automate manual tasks and optimize workflows. Think sprint workflows, starting branches for code, triaging bugs, smart status updates and signals how things are tracking.
- Connect execution more directly with planning. Provide smarter, more effective ways to map plans, releases and roadmaps to execution, so that every team member gains a holistic view of product development plans and status.
This is just the start, much more will follow. We know this will be a long journey and we are excited to share our learnings and thinking as we make progress.
Today, we are starting to accept teams and companies to our private alpha. If you are interested in joining early and influencing the direction of Linear, sign up here and follow us on Twitter.
