Karri Saarinen (00:00:00): My belief is that, like any domain or industry, the more it matters, the more the design matters. What happens is whenever there's a new paradigm, I don't know, like the mobile or the web or something the first iterations of those products existing there, they don't have to be super well designed necessarily because they are the first. (00:00:19): Then, as you build the 100,000 different email clients, any email client now has to be pretty good to be even considered an email client. It's like the bar is so high. I think today it's almost a very basic thing now. Pretty much from the very beginning, you need pretty high level design for people to even pay attention or consider you seriously. Lenny (00:00:46): Today my guest is Karri Saarinen. Karri was the founding designer at Coinbase, principal designer at Airbnb, co-founder of two previous startups, and most recently is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, which I'm fairly confident is the fastest growing and most beloved issue tracking tool in the world and something that a growing number of product teams are using to build their own product. (00:01:07): Karri and his team are building their company and their product in a really unique way with a huge focus on craft and quality, no AB tests, no metrics-based goals, instead a focus on taste and opinions. Also, no durable cross-functional teams, instead teams assemble around a project and then disperse once it's done. Also, they have just one product manager as the head of product and that's it. In our conversation, Karri shares how he built a culture around quality and craft, how he makes trade-offs, and how he operationalizes quality and thoughtfulness where design can be a differentiator in competing against incumbents. (00:01:42): We talk about something called the linear method of building product, which is big on building opinionated software, working in consistent cycles amongst other principles. We also get into Linear's unique hi...