How To Design Products That Truly Stand Out

Great design can make or break your product, so today I’m sitting down with Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear, who previously helped shape Coinbase and Airbnb. To kick us off, give us a quick picture of Linear today and a crisp description of what it does.

Linear is a purpose-built system for planning and building products with fast, integrated workflows that engineers use every day, so speed and polish really matter. It’s used by about fifteen thousand companies, including teams like OpenAI and Ramp, and we’ve kept a tight focus to deliver a consistently high-quality experience.

You’ve been a founder, the first designer at Coinbase, a design lead at Airbnb, then a founder again at Linear; what lessons from each stop shaped how you build now?

YC clarified the game: talk to users, build something they truly want, and keep a singular focus on progress and ambition while letting the rest wait. That simplicity helps you move fast and compound.

At Coinbase the job was trust and clarity in a new, low-trust category, so we moved beyond the Bootstrap look, tightened the product and site visuals, and used more grounded imagery so it felt real. Even details like a wobbly coin-stack logo were signals we needed to steady.

At Airbnb I saw a CEO treat brand as the company’s story and values made visible, with actions that match over time. That consistency builds predictability and trust in a way many startups overlook.

From the outside, Linear’s brand reads as craft and quality; how do you build that every day, and how intentional is it?

We chose to differentiate through authenticity and quality because features can look interchangeable, so we’re explicit about caring deeply about how the product feels and we return to rough areas without worshiping perfection.

Brand shows up in every touchpoint, including sales, so we hire curious sellers who can understand the product and customer context instead of treating sales as a generic function.

Logos and colors are expressions of values, but the real brand is how people feel when they interact with you.

How do you ship fast while maintaining a high bar?

We keep teams tiny and let engineers and designers own projects end to end, which avoids committee work and lets quality emerge through ownership.

We ship behind feature flags, dogfood internally, invite select betas, then do a final detail pass before a broad release, and we hire builders with strong product taste to make that possible.

If I want to hire people like that, what should I look for and ask?

Favor builders who owned end-to-end work—first engineers, open-source creators, or people who shipped substantial projects—over profiles boxed into narrow roles.

In interviews, go deep on a project they’re proud of and keep asking why they made choices, what was hard, and how users and the business shaped the outcome; you’re testing attention, judgment, and breadth, not just tech.

What edge do you feel your design background gives you as a founder?

Design is about finding fit that feels right, and I can often sense the path, visualize the outcome, and work backward to the inputs. It pushes me to hold a broader view than pure tech and keep the story, product, and people aligned.

What would you tell designers who want to start a company but are hesitant?

Broaden your scope beyond the canvas and learn the company’s real problems, because feedback is often about strategy and outcomes, not pixels.

Talk to sales and leadership to understand goals and constraints so you can solve business problems through design.

Why should founders care about design from day one, and what differences do you see when they do?

Strong design makes products easier and also drives an emotional pull that helps with adoption and even fundraising because investors are people too.

Hiring design early compounds quality and avoids painful, brand-damaging overhauls later.

From your “products that stand out” piece, what few ideas should every founder keep in mind?

Choose a clear differentiator and become unmistakably known for it, rather than chasing parity.

Hire people with judgment and taste, then give them room to work instead of micromanaging.

How do you balance giving space with the need to ship quickly?

We set reasonable time pressure so teams scope smartly and prioritize, then we check in for progress and updated timelines without running the calendar by the hour.

AI now makes it easy to generate designs and ship features; is that good, and what should people watch for?

AI is inevitable and will raise the baseline, which is useful, but the risk is you stop thinking and ship noise. If you want to lead, you still have to push past the average and stay close to the problem so you don’t lose the plot.

Do you worry AI will replace designers?

No; some work becomes cheaper, but the hard part is narrative and fit, and designers will increasingly direct and curate AI output.

As software gets cheaper to build, we’ll build more of it, which likely increases demand for thoughtful designers.

With Linear serving many top teams, how do you see product and design work changing?

We’re building an agents platform so bots can triage, take on tasks, and propose fixes you review, and there’s strong interest from leaders making AI a priority.

Our focus is solving concrete workflow problems where AI adds immediate value, rather than broad chat tools that try to do everything.

Karri, thanks for sharing the lessons and the counterintuitive ways you operate at Linear; lots here for founders to take back to their teams.

Thanks for having me; it’s great to be back at YC.

That’s a wrap for this episode of Design Review, and we’ll see you next time.