Linear · Go-to-market · Mid · 60 to 90 minutes

Linear GTM for 1,000 Plus Engineer Orgs

Linear is a software tool that helps product and engineering teams plan work, track issues, and run software projects. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

User segmentation
Positioning
Go-to-market strategy
Prioritisation
Metric design

The situation

The CEO and Head of Growth have asked you to propose how Linear should win larger customers, specifically companies with thousands of engineers. Linear has strong product love in startups and smaller product teams, and that focus has helped the company build a simple, fast workflow that users recommend to peers. Now more large companies are showing interest, often after a small team adopts Linear inside a bigger organization, but many of these deals stall during evaluation, procurement, or rollout. Assume the following numbers, for this case only: over the last 12 months, 18 percent of qualified inbound leads came from companies with 1,000 plus engineers, but they produced only 4 percent of closed new ARR. Startup self-serve remains healthy and is still the core business. Leadership believes there is real upside in larger accounts, but they do not want to turn Linear into a slow, heavy tool or distract the company from what users already love. Your job is to recommend a go-to-market plan for this segment. The hard part is choosing where to focus first, what frictions to solve, and how to balance a higher touch enterprise motion with Linear's product-led roots.

What to produce

A 1 to 2 page go-to-market plan.

Your answer must

Identify a primary beachhead segment within companies that have thousands of engineers, and explain why you are not targeting the whole enterprise market at once.
Define the key users and buyers in the motion, including end users, champions, administrators, and economic buyers, and name their main adoption blockers.
Propose a go-to-market motion from lead generation through evaluation, initial rollout, and expansion, with concrete channels or tactics for each stage.
Prioritise up to three investments to support this motion, which can include product gaps, packaging, migration support, sales enablement, or customer education, and state what you would defer.
Define 3 to 5 success metrics, including at least one leading indicator and one business outcome, and give a two quarter rollout plan with major milestones.

Constraints

Your plan must fit within the next two quarters.
Assume Linear can add only a small dedicated team for this effort: one PMM, two account executives, one solutions engineer, and up to two modest engineering investments.
You cannot rely on a large brand campaign or deep discounting to win deals.
The plan must preserve Linear's simple core experience and cannot materially slow the existing self-serve startup business.

Format

Structure your answer in five sections: target segment, buyer and user needs, go-to-market motion, priorities and trade-offs, metrics and timeline. Tables or bullets are fine if they make choices clear.