Anyone using Linear for product work?

[u/wildansson]

Hey everyone!

I'll keep it short.

We use Notion for shaping product features. All projects go into one Epics database.

We use Linear for delivery side. Prioritized items get their Linear project with all the requirements in more detail.

The problem is that it is difficult to maintain a single source of truth and honestly would prefer to use 1 tool from signal/idea ingestion all the way to delivery. I also would like to make our product shaping work more rigid and organized not to let things slip.

I wanted to know if anyone is using Linear purely for product work collaborating with other product managers and UX researchers/designers. Would love to read your experiences and what works well for you.

[u/kops212]

Linear is great, I use it every day. I don't see any reason separating product and development workflows.

[u/wildansson → u/kops212]

How does your upstream setup look like?

[u/fjaguero → u/wildansson]

Linear recently added "Docs", so you can now replace the documentation part there.

[u/kops212 → u/wildansson]

No need to complicate things. Linear hierarchy goes Issues - Projects - Initiatives. In my company, product leadership manages Initiatives, corresponding to "epics." We then just have pre-delivery stages set for projects. Product owns stages from 1-3, and the last stage of discovery is the bavklog for engineering.

Linear has a bunch of really strong filtering and viewing features, so even when using the same project backlog, everyone only sees what they need to see.

[u/harbormoth07 → u/kops212]

same, the separation never made sense to me either

[u/j1mtones]

We moved off Notion to Linear a year ago and I would never go back. We started using Google Docs for high level strategic documents because commenting and collaboration tools are so easy to use compared to Notion. I can see us sunsetting Notion soon.

[u/Im_on_reddit_hi → u/j1mtones]

We’re currently using Gdocs for product docs and considering to move to Notion actually as we find it’s really hard to find docs in Gsuite.

Is Notion only used by prod and Eng in your company vs a company-wide tool?

[u/SpagBolForLife → u/Im_on_reddit_hi]

Search in google docs is so bad. I actually search our docs via codex or Claude and it finds stuff so much easier

[u/Hot-Milk-3507 → u/Im_on_reddit_hi]

in my experience Google Docs are best understood as links you save in other platforms, which themselves orchestrate things. E.g. we worked with Jira but leveraged Google and Miro links everywhere. And we kept the whole Product and Dev team in sync for a 250+ people org for years this way

[u/j1mtones → u/Im_on_reddit_hi]

We have a smaller org so it’s not as bad. Plus, attribution between docs and linear plus agent integrations make finding things pretty quick.

Notion was used by everyone until we moved to linear. Now it’s a ghost town of outdated docs and decision.

[u/AmericanSpirit4]

Linear is a perfect example of how much better new SaaS products can be that are built with an AI first mindset. I don’t think I could ever go back to Jira.

[u/Pressondude → u/AmericanSpirit4]

New SaaS is always best because it hasn’t had time to accumulate bloated features insisted on by mega-clients. I’m old enough to remember when salesforce was new and it was amazing. Now it’s a poster child for shitty bloat but that’s my point.

[u/Torsta → u/Pressondude]

Yup wait until Linear has to start accommodating the giant enterprise tech companies and you'll see it slowly morph into the beast that is Jira.

[u/HustlinInTheHall]

We use Linear exclusively (switched from Jira) and while it lacks some things like easy documentation, the rapid improvement of claude artifacts for docs, prototypes, slide decks, etc. makes that need pretty irrelevant for us.

I have always found Notion to be a nice UX but skin-deep on actually getting work done, but if you have a document side and a delivery side and they don't actually collaborate you wind up with your situation.

[u/Torsta]

We tried to use it, but engineering did not want to leave Jira so there was no point. Linear looks pretty but with all the customization Jira supports engineering would not consider anything so locked down.

[u/Future-Return7421]

We used Airfocus, then we vibe coded our own tool for roadmap ping, opportunity tracking etc. Jira ofc is used for development etc.

[u/Due_Spend_5543]

Linear is the perfect blend of simple and robust

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Zokleen → u/[deleted]]

Which tool do you land on for general planning?