Happy Thursday.
Linear steers away from designers who make research a big part of their practice. That's Conor Muirhead, their head of product design, describing how they hire designers with us on Dive Radio today at 1PM Pacific.
He also says they have one product manager. Engineers are screened for design judgment, and designers move around the whole product with very little prescribed process. Code prototyping isn't a focus of how they screen designers, either.
He still wants designers deeply interested in users' actual situations. He just doesn't want the team waiting on a multi-day research project before they build anything.
TOGETHER WITH DSCOUT
You can keep asking AI to improve a prototype without ever finding out where a person gets stuck using it.
With Dscout MCP, you can bring that prototype into Claude and draft a usability study around it, including who you want to recruit. Once participants have responded, ask for a summary of their feedback in the same AI workflow. Then use what participants said to decide what to change in the next version of your prototype.
Dscout MCP is available to all customers with Dscout AI Studio.
Would you actually want to work this way?
Conor says they don't measure or track much.
They lean on intuition, with input from what they're hearing and their own product use. The visual bar stays high, including the restraint to leave out a flashy animation.
If you're trying to follow every portfolio tip you see, Conor's description is awkward. You can want the Linear job and still hate the way he says they work.
A design portfolio can prove you're good at work the hiring team doesn't want done.
Four polls, two questions
These are September 10 snapshots of four still-open, self-selected audience polls. We're looking at what respondents believe and prioritize; we didn't track their hiring outcomes.
Which do you think is more important for getting discovered?
What matters most when accepting an offer you'd seriously consider?
Only four votes separate pay and team on X. I'd want to know a lot about working with those people before accepting.
Brad got two different answers
Brad used AI to research a company's user reviews, then built a prototype to simplify campaign setup. He emailed the hiring manager asking if he wanted to see it. Didn't even send the link initially.
The manager replied, liked it and interviewed him without an application, despite other candidates already being further along. Brad built a more complicated prototype for a design test, reached the final round, and lost to another candidate.
Later, a college contact posted a different role. Brad texted him, they talked for about an hour, and he interviewed with the contact and his boss. He showed his AI design and operational systems, and an offer arrived about a week later.
That's where he works now.
Ridd and I are live on Dive Radio today, Thursday, September 10, at 1 PM Pacific / 1 PM Phoenix. Come hang, and bring the thing a hiring team asked for that made you wonder whether you wanted to work there.
— Tommy
