Design a Linear Asks experience for a 300-person company's IT and People teams handling internal Slack requests.

Introduction

Linear Asks turns requests from Slack and email into Linear issues. It started with engineering ("can someone look at this bug?") and has grown with custom intake fields (June 2025) and email intake (July 2025). This question tests whether Linear can serve teams that aren't building software, IT and People (HR), without losing what makes it Linear: speed, little configuration, and opinionated defaults. I'll design an Asks experience for a 300-person company where employees ask IT and People for help in Slack all day.

Step 1

Clarify Questions (3 minutes)

• Is the company already a Linear customer for engineering?

• Why it matters: Expanding inside an existing workspace is a very different motion from replacing a helpdesk.
• Hypothetical answer: Yes. Engineering and product use Linear on the Business plan, and IT and People currently use Slack DMs, a shared channel and a spreadsheet.
• Impact: We design for land-and-expand: IT and People join an existing workspace.

• How many requests, and what kinds?

• Hypothetical answer: Around 120 IT requests a week (access, laptops, SaaS licenses) and 60 People requests (payroll questions, leave, letters, onboarding).
• Impact: The volume justifies a real queue but not a full ITSM suite.

• Do People requests include sensitive data?

• Why it matters: Salary, medical leave and complaints can't be visible to the whole company.
• Hypothetical answer: Yes, about 30% are sensitive.
• Impact: Privacy is a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have.

• Are we competing with ServiceNow or Jira Service Management?

• Hypothetical answer: At 300 people, the realistic alternatives are Slack-native tools like Zendesk, Halp/JSM or plain spreadsheets.
• Impact: Our bar is "simpler than JSM, more structured than Slack."

Propose the Goal

Make Linear the place where a 300-person company's internal requests get resolved quickly and visibly, so requesters never have to chase and IT and People teams can see and manage their workload. The success outcome is a higher share of internal requests resolved within the agreed time, without requesters leaving Slack.

Define the Scope

I'll cover the full loop: asking in Slack or email, intake and routing, the agent's queue in Linear, resolution and updates back to the requester. Out of scope: asset management databases and full HRIS integrations beyond simple lookups.