Linear · Product sense · Mid · 45 to 60 minutes

How should Linear act on feature requests?

Linear is a software product used by teams to plan projects, manage issues, and run product development. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

Product sense
Problem framing
Prioritization
User insight
Tradeoff analysis

The situation

You are a PM at Linear, preparing a recommendation for product leadership ahead of the next planning cycle. As the company grows, customer feedback is no longer absorbed organically through a few conversations. It now sits across support tickets, Slack messages, research notes, sales calls, and app reviews, and product teams waste time stitching it together, sometimes from tools they do not use or cannot access. A recurring theme in customer conversations is requests for features like custom fields. Some teammates argue the answer is simple, ship what customers ask for more quickly. Others worry that taking requests literally will push Linear toward reactive, copycat decisions and away from the product judgment that made it successful. Leadership wants a clear proposal for how Linear should use customer feedback at scale without becoming a feature factory. Your task is to recommend what problem to solve, who to solve it for first, and what kind of product investment should come next.

What to produce

Write a 1 to 2 page product direction memo.

Your answer must

Define the core problem and explain why it is becoming more painful as Linear grows.
Identify the primary user and at least one secondary user, plus the job each needs done.
Evaluate at least two credible options, including directly building frequently requested features such as custom fields, and recommend one.
Describe the proposed user workflow and the minimum product surface Linear should build first.
Specify success metrics, key risks, and the first validation steps you would run before full rollout.

Constraints

Your recommendation cannot depend on giving every PM and engineer access to every external support, sales, and research tool.
Linear should not become a generic CRM, support system, or feature voting board.
The solution must feel native to product and engineering workflows inside Linear.

Format

Use short headings: problem, users and jobs, options, recommendation, success metrics, risks and validation.

How Linear actually played it

Linear's product team explains how it built a feature to collect customer requests while holding that customers do not always know what they want. Conversations showed about 40 percent wanted certain fields specifically to track customer needs. The post shows how to handle requests without being a feature factory.

Treat requests as evidence of a need, not a spec.
Talk to users to find the underlying job.
Build the tool that helps you learn from requests.

Built from Building what customers need, not just what they ask for by Sagan Schultz.