Product design question
Suppose new teams consistently say Linear’s planning and issue-tracking workflows feel powerful but hard to learn, while existing power users are highly satisfied. How would you redesign the experience to reduce onboarding friction without weakening the speed and flexibility that expert users value? Be explicit about the tradeoffs you’d consider and how you’d validate the changes.
- Linear
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests redesigning an experience to lower onboarding friction for new teams without weakening the speed and flexibility that satisfied power users depend on.
How to approach it
- Diagnose specifically where new teams get stuck, such as keyboard shortcuts or project structure, through session recordings and onboarding interviews.
- Distinguish friction from genuine complexity, since some of what feels hard is exactly the power that satisfied users rely on.
- Design progressive disclosure, with simplified defaults and guided setup for new teams while full power features stay one keystroke away.
- Avoid removing any capability power users rely on; add scaffolding like tooltips and templates rather than stripping options.
- Validate with both new-team activation metrics and a power-user usage-depth metric, to confirm nothing regressed for existing users.
What a strong answer includes
- Uses concrete new-team drop-off data, such as a specific onboarding step where completion falls off a cliff, rather than assuming what's hard.
- Proposes progressive disclosure as the mechanism, explicitly preserving full power-user functionality rather than removing it.
- Sets two paired success metrics, new-team activation improving and power-user usage-depth holding steady, so one segment's gain isn't the other's loss.
- Names a specific feature, like keyboard-driven navigation, that must stay untouched for power users.
Common mistakes
- Simplifying the interface in a way that removes power-user capability to make onboarding easier.
- Redesigning based on assumptions about what's confusing instead of real onboarding drop-off data.
Likely follow-up questions
- Which specific onboarding step would you fix first, and why?
- How would you validate that power users weren't negatively affected before rolling this out broadly?
More product design questions
- Linear wants to add one AI-assisted workflow next for product and engineering teams. Which workflow would you prioritize first, such as issue triage, planning, or summarization, and how would you decide using user pain, frequency, trust/risk, competitive gaps, and fit with Linear’s product principles?Linear · Product design · Hard
- You’re evaluating a new feature for Linear’s core planning and execution workflow. Walk through your end-to-end discovery plan: which users you’d interview, what usage data you’d analyze, how you’d align engineers and designers on the problem, and what concrete artifacts or decision gates you’d require before committing to build.Linear · Product design · Hard
- Pick a plausible new capability for Linear and walk through how you would take it from discovery to launch. How would you structure user research and product data analysis, turn the findings into a clear problem statement, align engineering and design on what to build, and decide whether the solution is ready to ship?Linear · Product design · Hard
- Design a TV for a car.Google · Product design · Hard
- Design a refrigerator for the blind.Google · Product design · Hard
- Redesign Twitter for eCommerce.Shopify · Product design · Hard
More questions from Linear
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop