The Weekly Summary

Karri Saarinen, CEO of Linear, posted how they structure their teams. He said "One of the unique aspects of Linear is that we expect the product team to be the PM". He goes on to clarify that with PM's you risk them becoming the defacto-decision maker and the team just outsources their thinking.

The benefits, according to Karri, are that the team produce higher quality products than you could spec otherwise. The drawback is that designers and engineers spend time talking to customers and not building. But the resulting higer quality more than compensates for this.

I completely agree with this structure, with a caveat that many people have pointed out - cracks appear when scaling. The former head of growth at Notion pointed out that this was their initial structure until they scaled beyond it. And Des Trayner, CSO at Intercom, likened the debate to the flat org / no middle manager posts that companies make until they reach a certain size.

Our goal at UXDX is to help companies get the best of both worlds - the speed of a startup with alignment at scale. We think we've found the right way - stay tuned for more on this in November.

This Weeks Updates

Enabling the Team

The Rise Of Engineering-Driven Development (EED) by Enzo Avigo
Engineering-driven design (EDD) is when features are initiated, defined, and executed by your engineering team. Product managers can't get a break!

Work Has Changed. Here's What We Might Do About It by Andrew Hogan
The biggest barriers to getting work done are being caused by three major forces: more people involved, more distributed work and more work in progress.

Product Direction

Why Agile Coaches Can't Be Product Coaches by Petra Wille
Agile coaches excel in delivery-focused areas, often lacking the depth needed for end-to-end product management. Find out what Petra suggests.

The Evolution Of Miro's User Onboarding by Kyle Poyar and Kate Syuma
Learn about the evolution of Miro's onboarding, the challenges faced and the strategies employed to improve the user experience.

Continuous Discovery

Who Owns Product Discovery? by Jeff Gothelf
Jeff goes into detail about the goals and history of product discovery to land at the uncontroversial answer of everyone :) Still a great read.

Using Research Ops To Ignite Your Continuous Discovery Practice by Julian Della Mattia
Talking to customers every week is great in theory but hard in practice because of GDPR, tooling, interviewing skill sets and more.

Continuous Design

Design For Meaningful Outcomes by Ian Batterbee
Outcomes over outputs. Easy to say but hard to get right. Ian explains the challenges and solutions for some common problems.

The Design System Ecosystem by Brad Frost
Brad goes deep into the design systems ecosystem, emphasising the importance of a well-structured and mature system.

Continuous Delivery

Bun Hype. How We Learned Nothing From Yarn by The Jared Wilcurt
The article analyses the rise of Bun, a new Javascript runtime that is challenging NodeJS. But we've been here before with Yarn.

React Server Components Made Our Site Faster by Christian Mathiesen
Some amazing stats: a 62% reduction in packet size and a 63% improvement in Google Speed Index.

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