How to Analyze Linear Customer Requests and Connect Your Roadmap to Feedback

Linear stores customer demand in four places, each tied to an issue or a project.

Synced attributes refresh in real time from Intercom and every 12 hours from Zendesk or Front (Linear docs). Linear Insights charts issue count and cycle time by label, project, or team, but its docs list no customer fields (Linear Insights docs), so demand analysis happens in views and exports.

Pull the requests into one table and score each item on four numbers. As a rule of thumb, the first pass takes an hour and a monthly refresh 15 minutes.

1. Build two views. Make one custom view of open issues and one of planned projects, showing customer count, request count, and revenue, sorted by customer count. Views can also filter by tier, size, and status (Linear docs).
2. Export the top 20 or so. On each item, open the command menu (Cmd or Ctrl + K) and choose Export customer requests as CSV. Export works one customer, issue, or project at a time; for a full pull, or a field the CSV leaves out, use Linear's GraphQL API, where each request carries its customer, creator, text, and Important flag (Linear developer docs).
3. Merge duplicates first. Marking an issue as a duplicate moves its customer requests to the original, so counts stop splitting (Linear triage docs). On Business, Triage Intelligence suggests likely duplicates as issues arrive (Linear docs).
4. Score four numbers per item: unique customers, their combined revenue, the share of requests flagged Important, and unique customers whose requests arrived in the last 90 days.

Weight the last number most. An issue open for 18 months has had six times as long to collect requests as one opened last quarter, so raw totals reward age.

Linear counts what got logged, not what customers need. Check four biases before you trust a ranking.

• Capture bias: Requests appear only where an integration or a person logged them. If support runs through Intercom, support-heavy accounts dominate while sales calls, interviews, and churn notes stay thin.
• Solution bias: Requests attach to issues and projects, so they measure demand for a solution someone already wrote down. A problem with no issue has zero requests.
• Logger bias: One diligent CSM can make their accounts look like your whole base. If one person created more than about a third of an item's requests, check other sources; the API records each request's creator (Linear developer docs).
• Flag inflation: If more than about one in five requests across the workspace are Important, the flag no longer separates blockers from wishes. Read the quotes instead.

The numbers below are illustrative, for a B2B SaaS team with about 400 accounts.

By requests, bulk edit wins. By recent customers, SSO wins easily, and seven Important flags say it blocks accounts now. The digest's 21 requests come from five customers, and one CSM logged 16 of them: a reason to call those accounts, not to build.

Now check the wider feedback. Support tickets and call notes from the same quarter show 19 accounts saying reports load too slowly. No Linear issue exists for it, so it appears in neither view, yet it has more recent accounts than anything in the table. To size problems from every source, not just Linear, see how to decide what to build next.

Import your Linear roadmap into the tool that holds your feedback, keep each item linked so Linear stays the source of status, and attach evidence there. Quotes pasted into Linear descriptions go stale as soon as new feedback arrives.

Then check both directions once a quarter, before planning:

• Building without evidence: active projects with fewer than three linked insights. Platform and security work often has none for good reason; a customer-facing project with none needs research first.
• Evidence without building: top problems in your feedback with no Linear project. Few teams ever make this list, and it is where the slow-reports problem surfaces.

To go the other way and turn a feedback theme into a new Linear project with an evidence brief, see how to link customer feedback themes to Linear issues.

If the evidence-without-building list is the one you can't produce today, start on Deck's Free plan: connect one feedback source plus Linear, import an initiative, and see which projects have evidence behind them.