Product design question
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
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What this question tests
Tests running a rigorous discovery process for a core workflow feature, specifying who to talk to, what data to analyze, how to align engineers and designers, and what gates a build decision.
How to approach it
- Interview a mix of power users and lapsed users of the current planning workflow, since lapsed users often reveal the sharpest unmet need or the clearest reason a past attempt failed.
- Analyze usage data: time spent in planning views, abandonment points in the current flow, and correlation between planning feature usage and account retention or expansion.
- Run a lightweight competitive and pattern scan, not to copy competitors, but to understand what workflow patterns users already expect from planning tools.
- Align engineers and designers early with a shared problem brief, the pain point and evidence, before any solutioning starts, so the team debates the problem once instead of relitigating it during design review.
- Require concrete artifacts before committing to build: a written problem statement backed by data, two or three prototyped directions, and a lightweight usability test with target users.
- Set explicit decision gates: don't move from prototype to build without evidence the concept solves the validated pain point, and don't move from build to ship without a clear success metric defined upfront.
What a strong answer includes
- Explicitly includes lapsed users in discovery, since they surface unmet need or failure reasons that current power users won't show.
- Ties usage data (abandonment points, feature correlation with retention) to the discovery, not just qualitative interviews.
- Requires a shared problem brief before solutioning starts, preventing engineers and designers from debating different problems in parallel.
- Names specific decision gates, evidence before build, a defined success metric before ship, rather than an open-ended discovery process.
Common mistakes
- Only interviewing current power users, missing the signal from users who tried and abandoned the workflow.
- Jumping to solutioning before aligning the team on a shared, evidence-backed problem statement.
- Committing to build without a pre-defined success metric, making it hard to know if the feature actually worked.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you weigh a strong qualitative signal against weak quantitative data?
- What would make you kill the concept before it reaches a build decision?
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
- 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
- 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