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The interview was a go-to-market strategy
Watching from a distance
It began with watching. Cristina Cordova had worked with one of Linear's founders, Jory, when Linear was a beta customer of products she built at Stripe, and again at Notion, when Linear integrated with the Notion API. She followed Jory and the CEO, Kari, on Twitter and observed the company through them for a while. Then she sent Kari a DM, though they had never spoken.
Getting serious
Kari lives in San Diego, so the first conversation was on Zoom. About two weeks later she followed up to say that if a role ever fit what she was looking for, she wanted to talk. The conversations got more serious, with Linear's head of product and head of sales among the people she met, and she flew to San Diego to spend a few hours with Kari in person.
The work trial
After several months, the work trial came next as the final part of the process. She used the week to see whether her go-to-market ideas matched Linear's own, and Linear used it to judge whether her output matched their vision for the company. Other executives she knew had done the equivalent as a write-up of where they would take the business. By the end she was more excited about Linear than she had been at the start.
Why would a company use a week-long work trial?
An interview shows how someone talks about work, while a trial shows the work itself. Candidates produce real output, and the team sees how they handle open-ended problems, feedback, and deadlines. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, is well known for using paid trial projects as part of its hiring. The method is slow and demands a lot from both sides, so companies tend to reserve it for roles where judgment matters most.
What goes into a go-to-market strategy?
A go-to-market strategy answers who a product is for, how it will reach them, and what it will cost. It usually covers positioning, pricing, the sales motion, and the channels that bring in customers. Software companies often choose between selling bottom-up to individual users and selling top-down to company leadership. Linear is a software tool used to plan and track product work, which makes that choice central to its growth.
How does a product integration with an API work?
An API is a set of defined requests that one program can send to another. When a company opens its API, other products can read and write data in it, for example by linking a task in one tool to a document in another. Both teams usually end up in contact, since integrations need documentation, support, and often shared customers. That contact is how the people at two companies can get to know each other's work before they ever meet.
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