Linear's secret to building beloved B2B products

You're taking the building side of the organization and the selling side of the organization and bringing it together. You're taking all of the commercial motivations and goals of the company and making sure that what you build actually solves for those goals.

"Sell side" refers to sales, marketing, and go-to-market activities, as opposed to the "build side" of engineering and design.

If you're leaving something on the table in terms of the kind of impact that you are having at your job, that's probably the thing that you're leaving on the table. You're probably already doing a good job of collaborating with engineering and design. It's probably the sort of sell side that there's an opportunity for you to have more impact.

It's your job when you're in the interview process to figure out what that burning problem is. Put on your discovery hat and go figure out what is the actual job to be done of the hiring manager when they're bringing on a new PM onto their team.

People talk about this as if there were a trade-off because when they think about speed, the thing they over-index on is rushing or being sloppy. What they should be indexing on is being really competent.

What it really looks like is you have some rough time budget for how long you think something's going to take. By the time 10% of it has passed, after week one, you have something that works that tests some kind of key hypothesis internally.