Jon Dale

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something.

And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy.

Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output.

This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work.

I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution.

Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook.

With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it.

My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day.

There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed.

Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work.

I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things.

I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master.

Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

I think we have lost some sense of judgment and moderation when it comes to product building currently.

The moment you turn something into a universally celebrated metric, whether that is token burn, prototype count, or percentage of agent-written code, you start losing sight of what actually matters.

I have felt the same way for a long time about overusing data and A/B testing to build products. The moment you reduce product quality or productivity to a metric, you stop shipping value and start shipping numbers.

A lot of what people are doing with AI makes directional sense. The missing piece is counterbalance:

1. AI should help engineers build better products. Leaderboards and adoption metrics can be useful as directional signals. They do not tell you what is being built, whether it is good, or whether it should exist at all.

2. Users do not care what percentage of your code was written by agents. They care about the outcome. Faster output is useful. Like usually, faster doesn't seem to add to quality, clarity, or stability of products. Power to build should not become an excuse to lower quality bars.

3. LLM-generated prototypes can feel like late-night whiteboarding sessions. They look exciting in the moment and feel productive very quickly. Then a few days later you realize the idea was shallow, distracting, or simply wrong. The same trap shows up in jumping straight to code and solutions more broadly. You may just be building the wrong thing more efficiently. Prototyping has its place. So do clear thinking, good design, and a real understanding of the user’s problem. In terms of activities or momentum, the main quest and the side quest can both feel productive but only one actually moves the mission forward.

4. Adding more to products is still dangerous as ever even if time or effort to add it has gone down. Every addition creates complexity, maintenance cost, and user confusion. New features should be pushed back unless they clearly show it should exist and how it improves the product.

5. Not everything needs to be an agent shaped. A simple scheduled task does not need a full LLM sandbox. Making something agentic because it feels current or impressive does not make it right-sized, correct, or effective.

The core ideas are:
- even if you can, maybe you should not.
- more power we have to build should not reduce our need to think, it should increase it.

[Teresa Torres @ttorres]

"Vistaly is the best tool we found that can directly connect our user insights with product discovery in a way that is interactive and visual for our squad and stakeholders to understand." - Edwin Yuen, Product Designer at The Times London

🎯 Learn how The Times London's puzzle team uses Vistaly to build their opportunity solution trees. See how they:
📊 Track metrics and product outcomes
🔍 Connect customer insights directly to opportunities
✅ Manage solution statuses automatically
🤝 Share progress with stakeholders efficiently

Check out the article to see how Vistaly's purpose-built features can help structure your product discovery work: https://t.co/z3qiOhJaOX

💭 What's your biggest challenge when it comes to organizing and tracking your discovery insights? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

[Jon Dale @jonathandale]

For puzzle players out there, I made a daily visual puzzle game called Vystery, where you uncover an obscure image bit by bit to figure out what it is. Check it out at https://t.co/gMJKJ7XZJD

[sari azout @sariazout]

ads suck. one price fits all subscriptions suck.

we wanted to try something different: choose the price that feels right.

the early results are fascinating.

RT for good vibes + I'll share them with you.

[Jon Dale @jonathandale]

@tone_row_ @mfrkankaya Nice! The ability to change fonts is great. Would be good to be able to add an accent color too.

[Jon Dale @jonathandale]

If you're looking for a Shadcn theme builder, this one https://t.co/YuKYEPAFBy by @mfrkankaya is really good.

[Teresa Torres @ttorres]

From the Product Talk Archives - Tools of the Trade: Visualizing Discovery with Opportunity Solution Trees | Product Talk

https://t.co/KCcx6DYSb3

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

[harley turan @hturan]

here's me controlling GLSL shader uniforms using my hands. imprecise exploratory inputs — like finding the right parameters when making highly-dimensional generative art — feel like they're better suited to fluid movements.

[Jon Dale @jonathandale]

@JoeyG Theft & Shrubbery — a classic.

https://t.co/At65vIWe7V

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

A never ending (theoretically) domino ring, built using LEGO bricks. The ring contains 64 dominos. A ramp runs along the inside of the ring, opposite the falling dominos, to lift them back up

[📹 JK Brickworks: https://t.co/PBWmr9iyBt]
https://t.co/nbb2JtSDnM

[Jon Dale @jonathandale]

@bertwitt These look great, thanks for sharing!

[Jon Dale @jonathandale]

@SoVeryBritish Fruitcake isn’t horrible

[Jeff Gothelf @jboogie]

Setting up goals is the beginning of your OKR journey. The next step is understanding how you, as a leader, must support product discovery.

OKR Leadership: Without Product Discovery Your Teams are Just Guessing https://t.co/yAadn8ycgA

[Jon Dale @jonathandale]

@UVAFieldHockey Is today’s game open to the general public?

[JomezPro @JomezPro]

Throw-etry in motion ✍️
Our final round lead card of the Jonesboro Open boasts an average rating of 1052! Watch now ⬇️
F9: https://t.co/snS05gLVYK
B9: https://t.co/wOxoQMCr1X

[Dan Price @DanPriceSeattle]

To help finance our $70k min wage, I cut my CEO pay from $1.1M to $70k

I don't miss anything about the millionaire lifestyle. Money buys happiness when you climb out of poverty. But going from well-off to very well-off won't make you happier. Doing what you believe is right will

[Nigel Dale @otboae]

Patera Building London Docklands built 1982 in Stoke-on-Trent twice moved so far

[Nigel Dale @otboae]

Epithets of High Tech architecture