This is a YouTube video titled "How will Linear avoid becoming bloated" containing a monologue or single-speaker discussion recorded on April 1, 2025. The speaker addresses common candidate concerns about startup sustainability and explains Linear's approach to avoiding feature bloat by rejecting certain customization requests that negatively impact individual contributor workflows.
This question actually comes to us a lot from candidates that are interviewing with us. It's very sensible for them to ask it, right? Because they see sort of history being kind of like littered with the corpses of startups trying to compete in the space and not making it. When we examine this problem, we kind of look at, well, what kind of feature requests can we debate? And what kind of feature requests do we absolutely have to say no to? And the stuff that we absolutely have to say no to is also the exact kind of thing that leads to this kind of bloatedness that makes ICs kind of hate their lives. It's very specific. It's customization features requested by middle managers in order to make reporting a little bit easier at the cost of making IC workflows worse. It's like, if it fits that description, we're just saying no. There's no debate because we've already thought about it. And this is the thing that we can't take a single step down this path. So I think that's like, Honestly, one of the core promises of linear is that we will not make this particular trade-off.