Obsessed with Linear? We are too.

I analyzed all of their 192 changelog entries to figure how this ‘boring’ tool became everyone’s favorite product.

Here’s three ways Linear uses customer updates to create lifetime advocates.

Public by Default

Linear's changelog is accessible to everyone (not just customers).

The company knows how polished and professional their changelog is, so they let the updates speak for themselves — going as far as making their changelog one of the primary links on their marketing site:

Linear's changelog promoted front and center.

Most companies only share updates with existing customers, but potential customers also want to see that the team is hard at work!

There's also the second order effects: if your team knows that the updates will be public, you naturally put more love and care into the updates, and you make sure that the updates can stand on their own. Sending a message to a customer who has been subscribed for five years allows for all sorts of shortcuts and shared language, but if the update might be read with someone brand new to your product you'll naturally explain the updates (and the reason for that update) from the ground up.

Consistently Frequent

Linear has published (a whopping) 192 updates since April 11th, 2019, averaging 2.8 updates a month.

They've kept up this pace for the entire life of the company, with the vast majority of their updates having 4-7 days in-between, followed by 8-14 days.

When I analyzed their updates I only counted two 30 day gaps between, which is wild. Most companies changelogs have 30 day gaps between every single update!

Psst, how many 30 day gaps do you have in your changelog?

If you've made it this far but still aren't sure how to get the most of your updates, Changebot can help!

We'll write an update for every important change, all on autopilot, so you can focus on building and we'll do the work of sharing.



Here's the results from my analysis for your viewing pleasure:

Linear customer update analysis

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Tell the Story

Most companies do a great job of explaining the "what" when they send an update to customers, but Linear also does a great job explaining the "why", and they do this through story telling.

Let's use this update, simply titled "Customer Requests" as an example.

Linear's Customer Requests update

They use story telling to explain how customer feedback is often scattered across support tickets, Slack messages, and calls – outside the product team's workflow and sometimes entirely out of reach. This creates a disconnect between what gets built and what customers actually want.

Instantly this framing helps us understand the headspace their product team was in designing this feature, and some of the direct pain points they're looking to solve.

This could easily have been “New feature, customer requests, click here to add one!” but they walked us through the process step by step.

Gentle Recommendations

If I had to provide constructive feedback to the customer update GOATs, I would pretend to struggle for a moment and then respond with two things:

  1. Directly connect updates to the bottom line, and
  2. Get credit for the "heartbeat."

Directly Connect Updates to the Bottom Line

Lets use the following update as an example, Slack Channel Notifications for Custom Views:

Linear's update for notifications around custom views.

They stick to their great story telling by explaining the situations that happen in a business where they might want to get notifications on custom views, but what’s the business purpose?

How do these views make me more money?

Does it prevent a product development bottleneck so our biggest customers don't churn due to a forgotten bug?

Or does this help us ship fasters to keep ahead of our competitors, bringing in new customers?

It might seem obvious to you, but most of our (lovely) customers and prospects are skimming, you can make it clear how you're hard at work making their business stronger without needing to go over the top trying to "sell" the benefits of the update.

Get Credit for the "Heartbeat"

Karri Saarinen, Linear's CEO, shared an update on Twitter with a jaw-dropping stat: 95% of reported bugs get fixed within 5 days.

5 days!!

If you've operated a tech company at any level of scale it's hard to imagine winning on all fronts in the way Linear does, both launching new, large, impactful features while also quickly resolving bugs as they're reported.

I shared earlier that Linear shared ~2 updates per month with the large improvements they're making. This is awesome, but doesn't share the day to day blocking and tackling they're doing to ensure the quality of the features they've already launched remains high.

What if there was a place where they could showcase those bug resolutions? I'd bet there'd be hundreds of entries a month on top of the new large feature that would further show how far Linear is ahead of their competition.

In Conclusion

If you've read this far I'll bet you want to get more value out of the product improvements you're already hard at work making.

Here's two recommendations on how to get more out of your changelog:

  1. Check out my 92 page book called the Art of the Update, available completely for free, no email required, right here on the blog.
  2. If you'd like us to write a top tier changelog for you, try signing up for Changebot and we'll do the rest for you.

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