Build product like Linear | Nan Yu, Head of Product (Linear, Everlane, BOA)

Today, our guest is Nan Yu, Head of Product at Linear, a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Prior to working at Linear, Nan worked at Mode, Abstract, Everlane, and Bank of America. On today’s episode, Nan talks to LogRocket’s VP of Marketing, Jeff Wharton, about: Why the only thing that matters is the next category launch — even if it’s held together with duct tape "You can have everything held together with duct tape and it's okay. And I think that's an uncomfortable sort of mindset for people to adopt really. At Everlane, the only thing that was important was the next category launch launch. You can sacrifice everything else. If the next category launch goes well, numbers go up, we raise more money, we get more customers. That's the only thing that matters." Why it’s important to have conviction in making decisions — even if the market slaps you in the face "But at the end of the day, you know, as a leader, you own the decisions that they're making. As a leader saying, 'Here's where we're going to be great and really differentiate and rise above the market.' And I could be wrong, right? I could be aggressively, tragically wrong, and that's fine. That's actually probably better, right? You want to know for sure that you're wrong and that you can switch directions; failing fast is a thing that we want to do. It's not like, 'Oh, well, we're gonna wait and see.' No, have some conviction around something, focus on it, and let the market slap you in the face if it's not correct." Why engineering teams can sometimes suffer from learned helplessness, and why it’s detrimental to product innovation "You see teams where there's a product manager per five or six engineers. And engineers will tend to check out a little bit from understanding how the product actually works, understanding the customer, because, well, we got this PM senior right here. It's not out of laziness necessarily, it's more like, well, this is someone's job description, so it wouldn't feel right for me to do that. And then you start having this learned helplessness. So I think that dynamic is probably way more dangerous than a product manager being overworked. If you end up in a state where your engineering team is like disengaged and they have learned helplessness, good luck trying to unwind that. That is a cultural change that you're not going to observe until it's too late, and it's very difficult to to reverse and it takes a long time." Links LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thenanyu/ Twitter: https://x.com/thenanyu?lang=en Chapters 00:00 Intro 02:09 Essential Tools for Product Managers 03:19 Career Highlights and Organizational Design 03:49 The Heirloom Tomato Analogy 04:18 Conway's Law and Communication Structures 06:11 Focus and Prioritization in Startups 06:53 Lessons from Everlane 13:23 Challenges in Organizational Design 24:02 The Dangers of Learned Helplessness in Engineering Teams 25:19 High Output Management: Key Principles 27:32 Team Structure and Soft Boundaries 31:07 The Aladdin Principle: Breaking Social Boundaries 31:49 Balancing Core Business and Checkbox Requirements 34:45 Linear's Unique Approach to Project Management 43:42 The Concept of Work Trials at Linear 47:00 Outro Follow LaunchPod on YouTube We have a new YouTube page! Watch full episodes of our interviews with PM leaders and subscribe! What does LogRocket do? LogRocket combines frontend monitoring, product analytics, and session replay to help software teams deliver the ideal product experience. Try LogRocket for free today.Special Guest: Nan Yu.