(2023-01-05) Designing For The Developers

Designing for the Developers. After working in various Helsinki tech companies, Jori Lallo and Kaari Saarinen moved to San Francisco. There, they launched the collaborative (social) bookmarking system Kippt as part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2012 batch. Lallo sees Kippt as a precursor to Linear.app in that it was a practical tool with a small but passionate user base. Kippt was acquired by the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and both of them joined that company in 2014, Saarinen as head of design and Lallo as a software engineer. Tuomas Artman moved to San Francisco by 2012, working at Groupon in engineering management.

“You get an itch after some time to do something a little bit more on your terms,” says Lallo. He’d taken a sabbatical after leaving Coinbase in 2018, and started nudging Saarinen and Artman about building the kind of tool they’d always wanted. It would be something that encouraged flow state, something that didn’t just work, but that made doing work more pleasurable. Each man, Lallo says, had experienced the hassle of switching between various software management tools, all of which they felt were not as helpful or elegant as they could have been.

When they started Linear, Lallo says they decided to bootstrap. So they built out the first version for small and mid-size companies (SMB), figuring that the three of them, and maybe, eventually, a few hires, could reasonably create their ideal issue tracking system. To grow, they invited friends in the startup world to use it. One day, they Tweeted about working on an exciting new software design product, but there was no waitlist signup link. It was just an announcement. Sequoia’s Zhan didn’t follow any of the founders, but people she trusts in her Twitter network did, and she spotted their tweets of excitement about Linear.

Often, software design management tools try to be everything to everyone through endless customization options. And, Saarinen says, sometimes customization led to moments of real momentum for him and his teams. But there were also countless times when his tools took him out of flow, because, he points out, most people are not that great at optimizing tool customization. So Linear chose to design a specific product for a specific person. The team focused on making the best tool it could for a software engineer, looking at one workflow at at time, asking, says Saarinen, “how can we make it reduce the friction as much as possible so that when they use the product, they don’t hit this annoying, frustrating thing, and kind of break that momentum in the team, or in their daily work.”

The solution was already part of the founders’ aesthetic preferences. One of the things people value about Scandinavian design is that, generally, objects don’t draw attention to themselves. They are plain, functional and offer the user something “honest,” in Saarinen’s assessment. Linear’s leap forward in software development is that it is designed to be honest in this way, to literally not draw attention to itself (encalming). Linear is designed to read as “professional” to engineers, says Saarinen, with a dark gray sans-serif font called Inter on a black background, and a gradient purple sphere for a logo. It’s based on the black coding environments many engineers prefer, minimizing battery drain and eye strain. It feels like a person looked at it and said, “This is it.” That person was Saarinen, who designed it. “When we started in 2019, I saw a lot of web companies having this kind of fun-type website where you have these colorful illustrations about people and things,” he says. “For me, work is serious. If I’m building a house, I don’t want my tools to be fun. I want them to be good. I want them to be professional.” Saarinen sees aesthetics as increasingly important. Competition for software adoption is so fierce, he says, that users are only interested in an app or program if it’s a pleasure to use.

These aesthetics are the first way Linear is designed specifically for coders. The next way is through endless streamlining—removing friction, rethinking workflows, eliminating alerts, checking that every action is intuitive and not confusing, and ensuring maximum speed so there are never flow-killing lags.

Linear is designed to simplify the How, enabling teams to focus on the What. And its functionality encourages designers and engineers to use it for building and planning together.