Linear is always a lagging indicator

Issue tracking tools like Linear become ineffective as visibility metrics when used by management to monitor organizational activity, because they lag behind actual work and incentivize engineers to focus on tickets rather than engineering itself. The author argues that significant work—including design discussions, planning, and ticket creation—happens outside these systems, making them poor measures of real progress; instead, analyzing Slack, Google Docs, and pull requests would better capture the true status of product development.