Karri Saarinen. CEO and co-founder of Linear, the project and issue-tracking tool built for software teams. Saarinen ships Linear as a product and operates it as a company, so his writing on AI and product development is grounded in decisions he is making in real time. His work on "context as the product" emerged from observing how the AI code generation wave changes what actually differentiates software teams: not who builds faster, but who understands the problem well enough to direct AI toward the right outcome.
Operating themes
- Context over output Saarinen argues that as code generation becomes cheap, what product teams sell shifts from the code they produce to the judgment and context they bring. Speed is the commodity; understanding is the differentiator.
- Learning rate as competitive moat Teams that use AI for speed while losing customer-learning cycles are giving up the durable advantage. The competitive moat moves from execution velocity to insight velocity.
- Product leadership redefined When AI can write the code, the PM's job is less about managing execution and more about ensuring the team has the context to direct AI toward something worth building.