Linear, Jira, and the Case Against Product Management Tools

I believe spending money on Linear or Jira is closer to madness than best practice. I've pushed myself to use both "the right way," as if their product teams hold some monopoly on how product management should work. They don't.

Start from first principles

Why do product management tools exist at all? The answer is almost embarrassingly simple: humans forget things and struggle to track action items consistently. That's the entire problem.

Does wrapping that problem in a GUI solve it? Not really. Before a team gets any value, everyone has to adopt the tool — and even experienced PMs have to relearn the specific interaction model of whatever app they've landed on. That onboarding tax doesn't go away after week one. It becomes a permanent source of friction: a new field nobody fills in, a workflow nobody quite agrees on, a view someone built once and everyone routes around.

The tool-switching tax is real

Learning Linear was a hurdle. Learning Notion was a hurdle. I never quite adapted to Trello.

At every new company, you're handed a different tool and expected to re-derive fluency from scratch. None of these apps deliver the kind of instant "aha" moment that a good AI interaction does. You don't open Jira and feel like it understood what you needed — you open it and start configuring.

That's the tell. A tool that requires a manual, a champion, and a "best practices" doc before it's useful isn't solving the underlying problem. It's relocating the problem into the tool itself. I'm clearly not the only one who's noticed — half of r/Linear and r/jira is people asking what they're actually paying for.

What should actually exist instead

The future isn't a better Linear. It's no Linear — replaced by interfaces that are scaffolded, scalable, and adjustable to what each person actually needs and is missing, generated on the fly instead of configured by hand. This isn't just a hot take; it's close to the "malleable software" thesis researchers at Ink & Switch have been building toward — software reshaped at the point of use instead of locked into whatever a vendor's product team decided everyone needs.

No ChatPRD. No Miro. No Linear. No Notion.

Just a database, a capable renderer, and a model that understands your users well enough to generate the right view for the right person at the right moment. The dashboard adapts to your workflow instead of asking you to adapt to it. Nobody has to spend a week "learning the tool" before they can do their actual job — the same shift I've written about in why AI is a digital employee, not a tool: once it can be onboarded to your context, it stops being software you configure and starts being something you delegate to.

The real cost isn't the subscription

The line-item cost of Linear or Jira is trivial for most companies. The real cost is the standing tax: every new hire's ramp time, every workflow debate, every team that quietly maintains its own shadow process because the tool's opinions don't match how they actually work. We pay all of that to rent a GUI for a problem — humans forgetting things — that doesn't require a GUI at all. Gartner is already predicting that 35% of point-product SaaS tools get replaced by AI agents by 2030 — and basic task tracking is the easiest category to replicate first.

That's the bet worth making now: not which project management tool to standardize on, but whether your team needs a standardized tool at all once the interface can be generated for the work in front of you.