Someone behind the software

I think good products carry something of the people who make them. Their experience, what they care about, and how they think things should work. You might not know who those people are, but you can feel their perspective in the product.

The industry often talks about software as though it comes out of a factory. You collect requirements, build features, and measure whether they work. Follow the process and you should get a good result. Now we're talking automating this whole pipeline with agents.

But two teams can talk to similar customers, have access to the same technology, and make very different things. The difference comes from how they understand what they see and the style they go about building it. The founder background or company DNA also shapes this a lot.

At Linear, we have always valued intuition over process or data. I think people sometimes understand that as making decisions based on personal preference, without much thought or evidence. What we mean by it is that your intuition develops through experience and understanding. You work on something, talk to customers, make mistakes, and learn what to pay attention to. The intuition is your point of view on something, and forcing to use your judgment, not hide behind faceless data.

Before we launched, we talked to people across companies and roles about how they worked. We had our own frustrations with this type software, but those conversations helped us understand what mattered beyond our own experience. Our perspective got better after those conversations.

So eventually the products develops a character through what its makers pay attention to, what they decide not to do and what they keep working on after it technically works. I sometimes think of this as the soul of a product. You feel that someone cares about how the whole thing comes together.

A feature can work perfectly well on its own and still make the product worse. Recognizing that requires some belief about what the product should be. Someone has to make the call, then stay close enough to customers to see whether they were right.

Recently, many products are starting to feel messy to me, including products from very successful companies. There seems to be more thought going into what the technology can do and what can be added than the form it should take. The product changes are primarily additive, not improving the core problem.

I think the reasons for this is that it's lot easier to add new capabilities, than rethink existing capabilities. So each product becomes a collection of abilities, without actually having unified point of view.

I wonder whether some of this comes from how the work is organized. Individuals work with agents to produce changes independently, each operating a small software factory. Each change might make sense on its own, but together they start to resemble Frankenstein’s monster rather than a carefully shaped sculpture.

Without the shared perspective, soul, or thought, the product becomes an average of all those outputs. The choices that once gave it character are being diluted by day. More things work, but it becomes harder to feel someone or even something behind them.

Making software is getting easier. I hope that gives people more room to develop a perspective and follow it further. To understand a problem deeply and keep shaping an answer until the pieces belong together.

I want to feel the creator behind the software, not the factories.