Context is the product: Linear's Karri Saarinen on keeping teams learning in the AI era

Key points

Key takeaways from Karri Saarinen's talk at the Lenny and Friends Summit — Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear on "context is now the product" (September 2026):

Tools improve faster than products. After a summer away from AI news, Saarinen found the tooling had moved on — new models, techniques and agents — but building great products, growing revenue and running a business were still hard. The real question, he argued, is not what the latest models can do but whether teams are actually making better things with them.

Don't become a software factory. Scaling output through more people, specialised roles and extra process predates AI, and it risks quietly outsourcing all the work and thinking along with the execution. Saarinen's warning: output is not the product — customers do not buy lines of code, experiments or throughput.

Learning compounds. Saarinen used the Formula 1 steering wheel — reshaped over decades into an ideal fit for high-speed, fine-movement control — to argue that great products come from accumulated context: customer signals, what has been tried, and the team's taste and judgement. Companies that stop learning from the work they do eventually lose their advantage.

AI can teach as well as execute. Linear collects customer feedback from sales calls, support emails and internal discussions into a shared context hub. Saarinen described running a daily briefing agent that watches that stream and surfaces what customers are saying about AI workflows, an area where he said no clear best practice yet exists.

Quality Wednesday trains the eye. As hiring grew faster than shared standards, Linear asked everyone to find and fix one quality defect each week — a hover state, a janky animation, a copy error — and to share findings in a meeting so the whole team learns how to spot small mistakes.

The feature roast keeps feedback candid. An optional weekly meeting where anyone can critique a new feature, nitpicks included, without it being personal. The building team gets a realistic read on first impressions — if people inside the company are confused, users probably are too — and a lead synthesises the raw feedback into actionable issues.

Intuition is training, not magic. Saarinen argued that intuition is learned from working on a product and listening to customers, so the more context a team absorbs, the better its collective judgement. Linear tells people to rely on intuition rather than run experiments, and to compound understanding through customer work.

Context becomes the product. The future product organisation, he said, will spend less time on execution and more on managing context, learning from it and bringing the team together around it. Automate the repeatable and low-impact; spend the saved time on customers, exploration, quality and reflection. Hiring stays the first step: buy judgement and taste, and the trajectory follows.

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