The Linear team advocates for "opinionated software" - products that are purpose-built for specific use cases and guide users toward a default, opinionated way of doing things.

The approach aims to reduce chaos from everyone inventing their own workflows as teams scale. Linear applies this philosophy by forming strong opinions on atomic units like issues and labels, while being more flexible on broader concepts based on customer feedback. Overall, their mindset is to evolve their strongly held opinions through experimentation and iteration.

Key learnings:

• Opinionated software guides users toward an intended workflow instead of general flexible tools

• Form strong opinions on core atomic units, but get customer feedback on broader concepts

• Strategically take on "product debt" by narrowing scope or making short-term optimizations

• Evolve opinions through experimentation and iteration, not just adopting industry frameworks

• Ship proudly by making necessary trade-offs, don't fear changing experiences that don't work