How Does Linear Help Teams Know What to Build?

Karri Saarinen says Linear can help provide some of the intent and context that building now needs, for humans and for agents, once teams have almost unlimited power to build and still have to know what to build.

A product team used to send an idea to engineering as a ticket. An engineer would build it, and the code would show up days, weeks, or months later. Building now takes minutes or hours. Many companies used the tool as engineering resource management, where engineers will not touch anything unless an issue exists, and Linear cannot stay in that role. Someone reports a problem. Triage intelligence checks whether the problem was already reported, whether something similar exists, whether the team has worked on it before, and who worked on it, so the picture of the problem is clear. An agent looks through the codebase for the cause. He leaves open whether it also connects outward and reads the logs. After evaluation shows a clear problem area, it tags a coding agent to make the fix.

The result is organizational leverage. Engineers can still work on whatever they want, while the system handles the rest: a shield that protects their time and still improves the product.