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

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