Per-seat pricing only works when your users are human. But when agents become the primary users of software, that model collapses.

Executives aren't evaluating software against software anymore. They're comparing the combined costs of software licenses plus labor against pure outcome-based solutions. Think customer support (per resolved ticket vs. per agent + seat), marketing (per campaign vs. headcount), sales (per qualified lead vs. rep). That's your pricing umbrella—the upper limit enterprises will pay before switching entirely to AI.

enterprises are used to deterministic outcomes and fixed annual costs. Usage-based pricing makes budgeting harder. But individual leaders seeing 10x efficiency gains won't wait for procurement to catch up. Savvy managers will find ways around traditional buying processes.

This feels like a generational reset of how businesses operate. Zero upfront costs, pay only for outcomes—that's not just a pricing model. That's the future of business.

The winning strategy in my books? Give the platform away for free. Let your agents read and write to existing systems through unstructured data—emails, calls, documents. Once you handle enough workflows, you become the new system of record.

The challenges start from the fact that it's never a good time to do a redesign. It's hard to make it a priority. It's difficult to calculate the ROI on it. And if you run your product with A/B testing, every global redesign will tank the metrics in the short term.

The real need for redesigns often comes when you have created a successful product and it has evolved with the market and users over time.

We ship small changes daily, and something major almost every week. Every year, it's almost like a new product. This incremental way of building the product is hugely beneficial, and often necessary — though it unbalances the overall design, and leads to design debt. Each new capability adds stress on the product's existing surfaces for which it was initially designed. Functionality no longer fits in a coherent way. It needs to be rebalanced and rethought.

If your product evolves fast, you should be paying this debt every 2-3 years. The longer you wait and the more successful your product becomes, the more you will have to untangle.

Slowly the user sentiment and perception might start turning negative and you might start looking like a dinosaur incumbent. This leaves an opportunity for some nimbler player to come along and compete in your market. Companies often try to address this with brand refreshes, but if you don’t refresh the product, nothing truly changes about the experience.

While the design debt often happens in small increments, it’s best to be paid in larger sweeps. This goes against the common wisdom in engineering where complete code rewrites are avoided. The difference is that on the engineering side, a modular or incremental way of working can work as the technical implementation is not really visible. Whereas the product experience is holistic and visual. You cannot predict which path the user takes. If you update just one module or view at a time, the overall experience becomes more disjointed. Secondly, if your goal is to reset and rebalance the whole product UI and experience, you have to consider all the needs simultaneously. An incremental approach doesn’t let you do that.

I’ve never seen redesigns successfully executed without the CEO behind it. While design might have a seat at the table generally, they are usually not able to convince everyone around that table. Only the CEO can push through all the excuses and give the latitude to a project touching all of the surfaces the product needs.

The way to get the CEO involved is to tie a design reset into a larger company shift or directional change. For example, if a company is looking at a new product, or major new feature, a redesign project can be a way to imagine how it might look or feel. This can be the justification for why you need to spin up the team (and at the same time, you can make a case for updating the rest of the product experience).

Organizations are often quite stuck in their views and ways of doing things, making them less enthusiastic about something new. When I was at Airbnb, the mobile redesign project was a way to shift the company to become mobile-first. It set the tone and got the message across to the whole company that mobile was happening and that it was happening now. While it looks like an obvious change in hindsight, there were many arguments against it at the time and it took a lot of convincing. Switching to think about mobile meant the design and features had to be rethought to work in that platform.

While Linear is a smaller and younger company, we’re also undergoing a shift. The product vision has widened from a simple issue tracker to a purpose-built system for product development. We are now moving into planning workflows that naturally come before the building or execution phase of building products. This product evolution creates new future needs from the product design, and we have to make space for it.

When you realize that a design reset is needed for your product, how do you actually get started with the project? You start with a standalone team to explore the new concept design and create something the company can rally around.The auto industry has a practice of building “concept cars”, where they explore the next version of the car freely and boldly without considering practicality. A concept car sets the direction, but usually is not expected to land in production because it’s too impractical or costly to manufacture.

A secret I've learned is that when you tell people a design is a "concept" or "conceptual" it makes it less likely that the idea is attacked from whatever perspective they hold or problems they see with it. The concept is not perceived as real, but something that can be entertained. By bringing leaders or even teams along with the concept iterations, it starts to solidify the new direction in their mind, eventually becoming more and more familiar. That's the power of visual design.

Building something valuable is no longer about validating a novel idea as fast as possible. Instead, the modern MVP exercise is about building a version of an idea that is different from and better than what exists today. Most of us aren’t building for a net-new market. Rather, we’re finding opportunities to improve existing categories. We need an MVP concept that helps founders and product leaders iterate on their early ideas to compete in an existing market.

It’s not good enough to be first with an idea. You have to out-execute from day 1.

The MVP as a practice of building a hacky product as quickly and cheaply as possible to validate the product does no longer work. Many product categories are already saturated with a variety of alternatives, and to truly test the viability of any new idea you need to build something that is substantially better.

Airbnb wanted to build a service that relied on people being comfortable spending the night at a stranger’s house. When they started in 2009, it wasn’t obvious if people were ready for this. Today, it’s obvious that it works, so they wouldn’t need to validate the idea. A similar analogy works for Lyft when they started exploring ridesharing as a concept.

Today, the MVP is no longer about validating a novel idea as quickly as possible. Rather, its aim is to create a compelling product that draws in the early users in order to gather feedback that you then use to sharpen the product into the best version of many.

If you look at successful companies that have IPO'd in the recent years–Zoom, Slack, TikTok, Snowflake, Robinhood–you see examples not of novel ideas, but of these highly-refined ideas.Since many of us are building in a crowded market, the bar for a competitive, public-ready MVP is much higher than the MVP for a novel idea, since users have options. To get to this high bar, we have to spend more time refining the initial version.

The original MVP idea can still work if you’re in the fortunate position of creating a wholly new category of product or work with new technology platforms, but that becomes rarer and rarer as time goes on.

Let’s jump over the regular startup journey that you might take today when building a new product:You start with the idea on how you want to improve on existing products in a category.You build your first prototype.You iterate with your vision and based on feedback from early users.You get an inkling of product market fit and traction.Optional: You start fundraising (with demonstrable traction).Optional: You scale your team, improve the product, and go to market.

In today’s landscape, you’re likely competing against many other products. To win, you have to build a product that provides more value to your users than your competition does.To be able to do this with limited resources, you must scope down your audience (and thus your ambitions) as much as possible to make competing easier, and aim to solve the problems of specific people.

When we started Linear, our vision was to become the standard of how software is built. This is not really something you can expect to do during your early startup journey, let alone in an MVP. But you should demonstrate you have the ability to achieve your bigger vision via your early bets. We chose to do this by focusing on IC’s at small startups. We started with the smallest atomic unit of work they actually needed help with: issue tracking.

We knew we wanted our product to demonstrate three values:It should be as fast as possible (local data storage, no page reloads, available offline).It should be modern (keyboard shortcuts, command menu, contextual menus).It should be multiplayer (real-time sync and teammates presence).

Remember, you’re likely not building a revolutionary or novel product. You’re unlikely to go viral with your announcement, so you need a network of people who understand the “why” behind your product to help spread the word to drive people to sign up. Any product category has many people who are frustrated with the existing tools or ways of working. Ideally you find and are able to reach out to those people.

Once you have a bunch of people on your waitlist, you need to invite the right users at each stage of your iteration. You want to invite people who are likely to be happy with the limited set of features you’ve built so far. Otherwise, they’ll churn straight away and you’ll learn nothing.

To recap:Narrow down your initial audience and build for them: Figure out who you're building the product for and make the target audience as small as possible before expanding.Build and leverage your waitlist: The waitlist is the grinding stone with which you can sharpen your idea into something truly valuable that will succeed at market, so use it effectively.Trust your gut and validate demand with your users: Talk, talk, talk to your users and find out how invested in the product they are (and if they’d be willing to pay)