Product planning is a fresh start for your product team. It should feel energizing and full of possibility. After all, it’s a rare opportunity to step back from the churn of daily activity and recalibrate your efforts in the most meaningful directions.
Instead of organizing through a disordered pile of customer notes every few months, continuous planners organize ideas into candidate projects as they arrive (and as of 2025, use AI to maintain them and keep them up to date). These projects form the center of gravity for both planning and execution. They are the most granular level an organization’s leadership can be expected to reason about, and they are the highest level concept that contributors are expected to think about on a day-to-day basis.
Organize your backlog around candidate projects
Project ideas can originate from all sorts of places within your company and from customers. They can arrive via Slack, support tools, sales calls, hallway chats, or even public exchanges on social media.
Wherever the ideas originate, the key is to funnel them into a central location for processing in a structured, predictable way. At Linear, we send all feature requests to the triage queue of the product management team.
As a quick aside: It’s important to have separate workflows for feature requests and bugs. Bugs describe how your product doesn’t work as intended and are prioritized by severity. Feature requests describe how your product might work in the future, and are prioritized through your continuous planning process.
As ideas come in, patterns will start to emerge. They could be overlapping requests for specific features, or feedback around common problems users are facing.
Once a pattern takes shape, we’ll create a candidate project against it. The project serves as a gathering place for user interview notes, related feedback, and additional requirements that we discover as we continuously develop a more refined understanding of what we’d need to build.
In this way, little by little, piece by piece, discovery happens all across the org. The result is an emergent map of the product landscape, with candidate projects as its main landmarks.
Promote candidates into priorities
When entering into a planning cycle, a well-organized list of candidate projects might be all it takes to form a roadmap—just select the top few and go.
- High (must do)
- Medium (should do)
- Low (nice to have)
- No priority (won’t do this quarter)
However, companies will also often have a structured goal-setting process to set strategy and ensure alignment. This could be a set of specific product themes or formalized systems like OKRs. Within the Linear app, those company goals are represented as initiatives, which can be nested into each other to closely model whichever system you employ.
We promote the projects that we want to take on by assigning them a priority:
- High (must do)
- Medium (should do)
- Low (nice to have)
- No priority (won’t do this quarter)
By starting from a prepopulated set of well-developed candidate projects, we’re never panicked to fill a blank page. This ensures that we're not just examining the first things that come to mind or being overly affected by recency bias.