Hire People Bigger Than Their Title
Build a small team of high-caliber people who each own more scope than their role, and screen for it with a paid work trial.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 91%
Linear runs at ~50 people with one PM by hiring people who can take on more scope than their title implies: engineers with product sense, marketers who can tell stories, ops people who understand HR. This removes 'not my job' friction and lets a smaller team out-execute a larger average one. The bar is verified through a paid work trial and a deep-dive interview probing whether candidates form and defend opinions.
Origin
Karri Saarinen's hiring philosophy at Linear, built from the founders' shared experience that small high-quality teams beat large average ones.
Core principles
- 01A smaller team of high-quality people produces faster, better output than a large team of average people
- 02Hire people who can take on more scope than their skill set assumes, so ownership spreads naturally
- 03Interview for product sensibility, not just the core skill: can they form, defend, and articulate opinions
- 04A candidate's depth is revealed by how far they can go explaining why a decision was right or wrong
How to run it
- 1
Grow slowly and never more than double in a year
Take deliberate hiring steps; Linear hired almost no one year one, a couple year two, and used 'never more than double' as a guideline.
Pro tip Slow hiring forces each role to be high-leverage and keeps the caliber bar from slipping.
- 2
Interview for scope beyond the skill set
Beyond core competence, test for the adjacent 'more than their title' ability: engineers for product thinking, marketers for storytelling taste, ops for HR understanding.
Pro tip Ask about past work: did they disagree with a team's choice, and can they reason about why one choice beats another?
Watch out Don't interview an engineer only for engineering; you'll miss whether they can do the product-owner work the role requires.
- 3
Probe opinion depth in a discussion
Walk through the candidate's own projects and repeatedly ask why a decision was made, whether it was right, and what they'd do differently.
Pro tip Strong candidates justify opinions with reasoning ('it wouldn't work for this kind of user'); weak ones stop at 'I just didn't like it.'
Watch out An opinion with no reasoning behind it is not the signal you want; push for the rationale.
- 4
Run a paid work trial as the final step
Bring the candidate in as a mini-contractor, give a deliberately vague problem, and have them scope it, build it in the real codebase, and present it.
Pro tip Schedule it on a weekend or holiday to reduce disruption; most who do it are glad afterward because they saw how the company really works.
Watch out Startups are hard to read from interviews alone; the trial protects both sides from a bad mutual fit.
In the wild
Engineer Andreas, unprompted, noticed the app's submenu required exact horizontal hovering and 'kind of sucks,' so he built dynamic diagonal safe zones based on submenu position, the way macOS does it.
→ Users can move diagonally to the target menu item; a craft improvement that came from an engineer owning more than just coding.
Common mistakes
Hiring for the core skill only
Interviewing an engineer purely on engineering ignores whether they can do the product thinking, communication, and scoping the role actually needs.
Accepting bare opinions without reasoning
'I just didn't like it' signals no product judgment; strong hires can expand into who it fails for and why, and you should screen for that depth.
Is it for you?
Best for
Startup founders who want to stay lean and skip early specialized roles like dedicated PMs
Not ideal for
Teams that need deep single-discipline specialization or can't offer the caliber of work that attracts generalists
From the transcript
“it was always easier to work with a smaller team very high quality people than with a very large team of like more average people”
“we never D more than doubled in a year”
“they can articulate why some some choices are better than some others”
“the last step of the process is the work tral and basically yeah we we they basically come as like a mini contractor to the…”
“when you see someone who really thinks about this stuff it's very clear to see that they they can just like talk about it forever…”
From the episode
Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus
Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO)