Context is now the product: Product leadership when software can build itself | Karri Saarinen
Linear co-founder and CEO Karri Saarinen delivers a keynote at the Lenny and Friends Summit examining how AI changes product development. He argues that optimizing purely for software output turns companies into low-learning software factories, whereas great products stem from compounding team context, shared judgment, and direct customer connection. Saarinen details Linear's internal practices—including AI-driven customer feedback briefings, Quality Wednesdays, and Feature Roasts—to illustrate how teams can maintain craft and intuition as AI automates execution.
- Making software yields two distinct outputs: the finished product and the team learning gained while solving hard problems. Read →
- Linear hosts optional, company-wide meetings called Feature Roasts before releasing any new product feature. Read →
- Linear uses a weekly ritual called Quality Wednesday where every employee finds and repairs at least one defect in the live product. Read →
- Linear runs zero A/B tests or split experiments, choosing instead to trust team intuition trained on direct customer context. Read →
- Software tools and AI models generate more code and internal experiments than ever, but customer willingness to pay has not changed. Read →