The Linear Startup Engineer

“What was the moment this product clicked?” — share yours

A software engineer at a startup of 10–100 people who has used Jira and has Opinions. They switched to Linear — or advocated for switching — because it's fast, opinionated, and built for people who care about the work rather than the process around it. They use Linear every day to track their own work, manage issues, and follow the work of their small team. The keyboard shortcuts aren't optional to them — they're the point.

• →Track their work without the tool requiring more work than the work
• →Surface blockers and priorities without a standup for every question
• →Keep the team's issue list accurate without it becoming a maintenance burden

• —Issue hygiene problems — stale issues, wrong priorities, wrong assignees — that accumulate in any system
• —Estimation discussions that produce numbers nobody believes
• —Integrations that push GitHub activity into Linear without it being useful
• —The moment a startup gets big enough that someone wants to add process to Linear

• Software tools should have opinions — the absence of opinion is a design failure
• The best project management system is the one engineers actually maintain
• Speed is a feature — every 100ms of latency is a papercut across 1,000 interactions a day

Uses Linear as both a daily task manager and a team-wide project tracker. Follows 2–3 cycles per team with 2-week cadence. Uses the Linear CLI and GitHub integration. Creates issues from Slack via the Linear bot. Has strong feelings about priority labels. Keeps the "My Issues" view open at all times. Has set up custom views that the rest of the team uses without knowing who built them. Uses Linear on Mac. The Windows app is for other people.

• →Keyboard-first design that eliminates mouse dependency in core workflows compounds
• →into meaningful time savings across a year
• →Smart issue templates that reduce the setup cost of new issues improve backlog hygiene at the source
• →GitHub integration that surfaces relevant context without noise reduces context switching
• →Fast cycle management that respects engineering time keeps project management from becoming a second job

Pairs with `startup-pm` for the issue creation and prioritization workflow from both sides. Contrast with `jira-primary-user` to map exactly why engineers choose Linear and what they give up. Use with `senior-engineer-skeptic` for Linear evaluation scenarios in teams considering migration.