Karri Saarinen
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Episodes
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First of Kind · Karri Saarinen: How We Win
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Do Software Products Still Need a User Interface?
Karri Saarinen says software products still need a user interface when people have to share one account of the truth, and sometimes they do not. Agents are often the better way in and the better way out. A person can talk through a complex workflow that would take a long path of buttons, and the agent does the work. A large pile of information is a poor thing to browse. He uses 40,000 customer requests as the example: nobody can read that list, so the agent can synthesize it, structure it, or find what matters, and the team does not have to build every reporting screen.
The interface still matters because an agent is not a source of truth. It can answer two people differently, leave an item
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Should Designers Design in Figma or in Code?
Karri Saarinen still designs product ideas in Figma rather than in code. He does not feel the need to design in code. A simple fix is a different case. If a border or a button is wrong, he might send it to a coding agent and see whether the live result works. For the thinking, he opens Figma.
He might use Linear's agent to gather the underlying need, then take that understanding into the file. He was doing this recently with an idea for team documents. In Figma he makes one screen, duplicates it, tries another direction, and goes back. A file can end up with tens or hundreds of screens. He does not want to solve code problems while he is still exploring the idea. Design, for him, is the pla
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Why Did Linear Compete on Quality Instead of Speed?
Karri Saarinen says Linear competed on quality instead of speed because a faster product would not win a slow market. Many people had already tried to make a new product in this category and failed. He wanted a place where Linear could win on its merits, by being better and clearly different, not just by moving fast.
He does not like competing in every race. He chooses the games he plays and tries to win by his own rules. Soleio called that choice a first of its kind: a viewpoint declared up front, competing on quality rather than growth tactics, and refusing to move fast and break things. Linear was profitable from early on, which gave him room to compete on his own terms.
He is surprised
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Why Does Linear Reject the Minimum Viable Product?
Karri Saarinen rejects YC's MVP advice. Linear moved fast and still tried to build a good product, and trying to be good is how the company stays unique.
YC often tells founders to go do something fast and try it out, because smart people will figure something out. A lot of companies start with an idea that is not good, stumble onto something, and turn it into something good. He thinks the advice YC gives is probably right, and he does not personally believe it. Linear never did the MVP. He would not start a company he knows nothing about, like making soap. He would start a company in something he already knows and is interested in, where he has domain knowledge, then take a position on wha
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Why Did Karri Saarinen Start Linear?
Karri Saarinen started Linear because bug tracking is work people in the industry have to do almost every day, and it feels bad that they are forced to use bad tools. He wants the aesthetics and the feel to be good so people can enjoy the work.
A product can do really well while people hate the company and the product. He would rather they enjoy it. Soleio called that enjoyment a moral good, and Saarinen agreed, even if the business would not do well. One reason he started the company is that employees often have no choice, because the company picks the tools. Design problems always have many solutions. A lot of the time the choice is aesthetic: he simply likes one better.
He wants that qu
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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, whet
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Has Linear Ever Run Split Tests?
Karri Saarinen says Linear has never run split tests. Instrumentation is used only when a specific question needs an answer. Watching the dials and looking out the window is probably better, while many companies pick one and more often trust the dials. Soleio compared that habit to a driver following Google Maps off a cliff, and Saarinen agreed.
Linear is a collection of many workflows. Weekly active users and other counts are tracked, but a new feature does not have to be used by everyone, or even by every company in a segment. Company needs are similar and also different by size and culture, so one success metric is a poor fit. Feedback is collected in Linear from discussions, sometimes a
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How Did Facebook Notes Reveal Group Messaging?
Soleio found that Facebook Notes revealed a desire to send messages to groups of people when users wrote notes and tagged others as if the tags were recipients. The team spent a couple of months building Notes, essentially blogging on Facebook, launched it, and watched the numbers for how people used it.
Messaging on Facebook allowed only one person, one recipient at a time. People were hacking a product meant for another use to express a latent desire to message groups. The pattern kicked off one to two years of his life at the company, spent putting the energy in its right place.
People self-report certain things while behavior sometimes disagrees, and the truth sits at the intersection.