Startups using Linear - is it a company wide project mgmt system, or do you use other tools too?
We made a move to @Linear at Product Hunt within the past 6 months. Curious if other startups using @Linear have adopted it company wide. Or is it primarily used by the EPD team and the rest of the company uses different PM tools? And if so, how is it working?
We were previously on @Asana . I like to say I am tool-agnostic, and can adapt our company processes to whatever tool the team will use, but with many project management tools, I had my love/hate relationship with Asana. @Notion works well as our homebase for company and project documentation, brainstorming, etc. and can even work for simple task/project management (I love their inline databases). But if you're looking for more robust tools, I haven't seen Notion up to the task. I have also tried@Trello , @Todoist , @Basecamp , @ClickUp etc at other companies.
I started testing @Flat for my own personal task / project management and like it (to me, it's kind of like really clean Notion-like Project management tool) but the challenge is if no one else is using it, there's no transparency/collaboration benefits. Our team already uses Linear to submit issues to the EPD team so am wondering if other companies have adopted Linear company wide and if so, how it's going.
Replies
Linear
(Linear founder). Biased answer but at Linear marketing team uses Linear alongside the product team. I think the main benefit that there is more singular place for what is being built and how is to going out of the door.
Often projects start with project brief, then team starts exploring and building. Once the project is taking shape, marketing can start pay attention to it, and maybe start crafting the messaging or other plans in the document. When the project gets on the launch track, the marketing team can take over the project updates and start updating on the launch plans. So marketing team gradually joins the project and eventually takes over more to coordinate.
We also run our changelog as "Changelog" marketing project, and then post a project update about the next changelog.
Example from our sub-teams launch:
GTM side:
The benefit GTM often can follow along what is happening much easier in Linear than it other tools. We work features in projects, so when marketing needs to get involved, the can jump in to the project as well.
Sales, success and support can all submit bugs, customer requests. We have shared slack channels with many customers where we can do Ask creates issue with two way comment syncing to Slack. Support tools can integrate with Linear and you can directly create issues to the Triage. We also recently launched Customer Requests, you track feature request per customer basis, so you can priories or better track those requests and when you complete them. Those requests can also help marketing to craft the messaging which segment has been primarily asking for it.
Linear for marketing teams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0hQWaBLrxw
Managing customer requests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkIgUNSUgfU
General/product team:
Projects have tasks, documents and updates. You can kind of nicely run the project and meeting notes etc within the project. (Plan)
Bug tracking + random tasks and asks: You can enable Triage for each team and they can quickly respond to issues. This can work for marketing issues as well as engineering (Build)
Also native mobile app
Product Hunt
@karrisaarinen Thanks for sharing this in depth answer. I def agree that it's best to track everything in one place across the company. I already use Linear with the eng/product team but was intimidated by the technical feel of Linear vs something like @Flat which is more Trello like, but more powerful with it's views, Notion-like capability and collaboration. Perhaps I just need to get over my unfound fears and test it out and see if it can work for the rest of our teams!
cc @ben_griese @gabe @aaronoleary check out the youtube videos from Karri in case this is useful for Prod Ops and Content. Linear for marketing teams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0hQWaBLrxw
Managing customer requests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkIgUNSUgfU
Product Hunt
@karrisaarinen @ben_griese @gabe @ph_leeanntrang oh nice!! will check it out!
Flat
Flat founder here.@ph_leeanntrang I agree with you and @karrisaarinen on the value of a cross-functional clearinghouse for project status—that was actually one of our motivations for building Flat. Linear's a great product, but as you've seen, it's tailored for software development teams. We'd be happy to hop on a call with @gabe and@aaronoleary to see if Flat could be a great fit for them.
We rolled out Linear company-wide a few months ago, and it’s been a great move. It’s fast, simple, and much smoother than Asana. The best part is how well it keeps product, engineering, and design aligned. The command menu makes task management quick, and automations save time. Tracking progress is much easier now.
Tab Slayer
I personally use @Trello for my "life" board. this has oil changes for my car, reminders to handle something for my mom, etc. basically something i wont do in the next 24 hours but is a discrete task.
for my personally projects, I put a readme or todo file in the code itself, then just add / remove items there as I ship the features:
At $day_job I send messages in my "chat with myself" in slack as a light weight project management tool. (just edit the comment to strike-through when im done.
Tab Slayer
forgot to add, at $day_job we use @Linear (hi coworker @ph_leeanntrang :wave: ), so the above are just my more granular habits.
@catt_marroll "Todo stacks" are so interesting. Even with the fancy tools, everyone seems to use some combo of lightweight "non-todo" software to keep track of them.
Tab Slayer
@steveb ya, so many perks for portability, ease of use and just general viability. kind of an interesting idea to make a task tracker that is a glorified text file that lives in your projects git repo. probably some reason why that winds up not being a good idea, but with how tightly many of these tools couple to git, would be interesting to just remove the middleware.
Product Hunt
@catt_marroll Thanks Matt! I used to use Trello for my personal tasks too (after using it at work) but I realized that I preferred task mgmt and notes organization in one place vs needing to go to multiple places.
I've been using @Flat for both long term task/project management and notes, and resorting back to Apple notes for day to day things. I still feel Apple notes is not sustainable and not a proper task manager so got excited by the beautiful @Blitzit and LOVED the timebox framework!
At the end end of the day, it felt too "tick the box" focused for me so I'd rather have a @Flat like task manager with some apple notes features and @Blitzit timeboxing features built-in (Flat CEO@sethpurcell did let me know that's something they are looking at!)
Outside of that, for a company-wide tool, there is a ton of value of being able to see what everyone is working on and being able to pull people into something you are working on so hope Linear can solve this for us, or find an alternate workaround that doesn't feel too hacky.
TimeAlign
My team recently switched from Jira to @GitHub Projects simply to centralize product tasks in the same place as our repo. Our biggest bottle neck has always been software development, so as the PM, I'm perfectly happy to make things as easy as possible for our devs.
However, as the Product Designer, I've been keen on switching to @Linear for a while now. I believe working with well-designed software inspires quality designs for our product @TimeAlign
Product Hunt
@matty_reed Have you tried to introduce @Linear to your team? We decided to go for it as it's free to get started for unlimited team members (up to 250 issues). @phamilton commented below how Linear has spread beyond product development for his team. Sometimes it just takes one team to start and see success before others start to follow.
TimeAlign
@phamilton @ph_leeanntrang I've not made the switch yet, nor will I for a while until the team grows. We just migrated to Github so we are going to go with this for a while.
We use our own application for the product teams (atono.io) and asana for marketing. We previously used Linear and found that the needs of the software development team were unique. With our own product it was even more apparent since we embed features for running the software like feature flags and feature analytics into the the actual story. Other things like bug triage, bug capture from a browser, etc. were too specific for software development teams versus our needs for project management. We found that notion got messy and clickup was too busy to learn.
Product Hunt
@troy_mcalpin1 Thanks Troy for sharing. I found the same for Notion and Clickup. Excited to check out Atono's launch 😁
I def want to get Linear a try but it just feels/looks technical at first glance and I guess that feels intimidating to me... 😅
Cake Equity
Yes, I think Linear and Notion are the best ones.
incident.io
We’re huge fans of Linear here at incident.io and we’ve run our product teams on it for years now.
This year, we’re doing a big push to get all projects in the company running through Linear. So far, it’s really promising and working great. As a founder I feel far more plugged in to what’s happening outside my immediate eye line.
Everything from our workplace ops, to marketing and talent teams - all major initiatives and projects are now going in Linear when it comes to tracking and updating on work in flight.
We still do a fair amount of documentation / planning in Notion (our knowledge base and writing platform historically) but Linear is the central source of truth for “something we are shipping, with an owner, milestones and updates”.
The number of cross functional projects means that with everyone on linear, tracking those, moving things between teams and ensuring one single view over all work from shipping to marketing to selling, is way simpler.
We have a central project updates channel in slack and all updates come through via Linear - that’s been a huge level up for visibility and I’m loving seeing it spread outside product development.
We also heavily use Customer Requests and Linear asks for our marketing, design, techops (IT) and workplace channels, making it easy for teams to triage internal requests alongside project work and ensure those submitting asks can easily follow along. I find it works great.
Product Hunt
@phamilton Thanks Pete! I love that you highlighted being "far more plugged in to what's happening". No one likes having meetings, esp status meetings, and they're unnecessary if everyone's work is tracked in a way that someone can get a good overview of what's going on in a project and it's status across the company without needing to ask someone. In fact, it makes meetings more valuable because when you do talk, you can dive in past all the superficial stuff and get at the important discussion points or blockers.
It's interesting that you still use @Notion for documentation/planning, us too! I think there's something about the structure of Notion (often people refer to it as a second brain) that I think project mgmt tools have yet to be able to replicate. @Flat comes close to this for me but I 1) still reference Notion docs inside my Flat tasks/project and 2) once the task or project is "complete" in Flat there's no real structure around the documentation to go back to (unless you search through completed tasks).
We are using @Linear for everything dev related and i frankly don't see what needs to happen for us to switch. Unfortunatelly (from my perspective of course), marketing, HR & management are using @ClickUp, which is obviously not ideal for everyone involved. Dev teams also started from @ClickUp, then moved to @GitHub projects (which is not great for multiple reasons despite the latest efforts on making it viable) and finally settled down on @Linear, which is one of my favourite tools ever, and engineers love it. For some personal errands i stick to @todoist, good enough so far.
Product Hunt
Tools like Linear/Asana help with execution, but I’ve seen a growing gap around communication-layer chaos..email, meetings, prep, context chasing.
That’s what we’re focusing on with an AI EA: not just project tracking, but automating the prep work around projects.
Curious if anyone’s felt that gap between PM tools and actual daily workflow?