1. The Pain (Current State)

Approval accelerates when your manager can feel the friction your team experiences today.

Typical pains when teams are not using Linear:

• it's too customisable, which makes it easy for people to develop painful workflows and systems. When consistency is at zero and everyone has to do things differently in every single project, the whole team wastes time context switching

• That lack of clarity can lead to blown out projects and a lack of understanding as to what initiatives projects even relate to

• Hard to understand true delivery velocity

• Engineering time wasted in status meetings and manual updates

• No tight connection between product roadmap, cycles, and day-to-day work

• Context switching between tools reduces deep-work time

• Bugs and tasks get lost because workflows aren’t automated

Add directional numbers if you can:

• “Developers spend 3–5 hours a week updating Jira or responding to status pings.”

• “Two launches slipped last quarter because blockers weren’t surfaced early - in [insert your tool] this occurs because [clear reason].”

• “We maintain three different sources of truth (roadmap, sprint board, backlog).”

The clearer and more concrete the pain, the easier it is for leadership to approve the change.

2. Desired Outcomes

Tie Linear directly to measurable improvements in speed, clarity, and engineering efficiency.

What Linear unlocks:

• A single, elegant workflow for roadmap → cycles → tasks that benefits all teams

• Faster issue creation and triage, reducing PM/engineering overhead, with agent integrations an option, allowing the team to easily leverage AI

• Real-time velocity insights and progress tracking

• Dramatically less admin, more time spent building

• Fewer meetings because alignment becomes asynchronous and automatic

Anchor these outcomes to business objectives:

“Moving to Linear increases throughput, reduces engineering admin by 30–40%, and shortens cycle times, allowing us to deliver more without adding headcount.”

3. Options Considered

Managers want proof that your recommendation is strategic, not reactive.

Status Quo

Keeping the current system guarantees existing inefficiencies remain. As the team scales, the cost of misalignment grows.

Other Tools (Jira, Asana, ClickUp, Notion)

Be clear but fair about why they’re not the best fit:

• Jira: powerful but heavy; slows teams with configuration overhead

• Asana: not built for engineering workflows or velocity tracking

• ClickUp: flexible but complex; long onboarding curve

• Notion: great for docs, weak for issue tracking at scale

Why Linear Wins

• Extremely fast and intuitive for engineers (reduces adoption risk)

• Clean, opinionated structure that prevents process sprawl

• First-class support for roadmaps, cycles, and scoped work

• Saves time through built-in automations and keyboard-driven UX

• Strong analytics with no setup required

• Integrates smoothly with GitHub, Slack, Figma, and more

Talk about the other options without a silly level of bias to your preferred outcome, this section shows you’ve evaluated the decision with CFO-level rigor.

4. Cost and ROI

A strong business case doesn’t require perfect accuracy, directionally correct numbers are enough. Demonstrate you understand this aspect of things.

Current Subscription Cost v Linear

A table is useful here. If you don't know current costs, speak to someone in finance or invite them into Riff.

Here are Linear's costs.

• Licenses: ~$X per user per month

• Implementation: minimal because Linear is nearly zero-setup (this will vary on company size)

• Estimated annual cost: $X

• Migration cost: (if you've been using another platform for years, how long will it take to replicate what you have, consider asking the vendor what support they can offer here, smart ones often say they'll do it all for you)

Don't be naive to switching costs, it reads better if you've shown you get it and include an estimate than pretend 'switching is free' - no, no it is not.

ROI Examples

Where Linear typically produces value:

• Less manual reporting → ~2–4 hours saved per engineer per week

• Fewer sync meetings because alignment lives in Linear

• Faster cycle times → more features delivered per quarter

• Reduced operational overhead = delayed need for additional PM/eng hires

• Fewer dropped tasks → lower risk and smoother launches

A helpful framing:

“If Linear saves each engineer just 3 hours per week, that’s ~150 hours per person per year. At an average loaded cost of $X/hour, that’s $Y in regained productivity, far exceeding the tool cost.”

Decision-makers approve when value overwhelmingly outweighs cost.

It can help to point at companies like yours that have clearly seen the ROI and have shared a case study, there are examples here.

5. Implementation Path (Minimising Risk)

Show leadership that rollout is going to be well managed. For larger organisations, define a pilot to assess whether your assumptions meet reality. Suggest who, how long and what you'll measure.

By making the rollout phased and reversible, you reduce perceived risk.

Linear provides a clear guide on how to do this practically.

The One-Page Business Case Template

Copy, paste or save yourself a heap of time by asking Riff to prepare the business case for you, completely custom to your org.

Request for Approval: Move to Linear for Engineering & Product Workflows

1. Problem / Current State
Our team currently relies on a mix of tools (____). This leads to:

• X hours/week spent updating or requesting status

• Unclear ownership of issues and roadmap items

• Slow or inconsistent sprint progress visibility

• Duplicate work and preventable delays

• Increased coordination overhead as we scale

• [concrete examples where you can point to the current process as a good part of an real issue]

2. Proposed Solution: Linear
Adopting Linear will:

• Centralize roadmap, cycles, and tasks

• Automate updates and reduce manual admin

• Improve delivery speed and surfacing of blockers

• Provide real-time progress visibility for leadership

• Save an estimated X–Y hours per team member per month

3. Options Considered

• Status Quo: Inefficiencies and delays persist

• Other Tools: [List limitations clearly]

• Recommended: Linear for its speed, simplicity, automation, and fit for engineering teams

4. Cost and ROI

• Estimated annual cost: $X

• Estimated saving on current costs: $X [if relevant]

• Estimated productivity gain: X hours/month

• Value of time regained: $X/month

• Additional benefits: improved predictability, fewer delays, reduced coordination overhead

• Expected ROI: within X months

5. Implementation Plan

In March we propose trialling Linear with the Payments team - 10 developers, 1 PM and 1 designer. We will replicate our current projects and tickets from Jira into Linear (expecting this will take less than 2 hours). We will trial linear for 4 sprints and report back on whether our assumption on time savings, ease of use and speed to ship are realised.

Plan:
Week 1: Create core projects, set up cycles, import issues
Week 2: Pilot with one squad (engineering + PM + design) for 4 sprints
Week 3: Roll out templates, automation, and integrations
Week 8: Approval stage gate: Expand to full team

6. Recommendation
Approve an 8 week trial before approving a 12-month Linear subscription to reduce inefficiency, increase velocity, and support scalable product delivery - saving [$X per annum].

Riff Helps You Get a Decision Faster

Most AI tools give you fluffy irrelevant text you still have to rewrite. Riff helps you stress-test assumptions, it asks the questions your manager will so you look 10x more prepared, you can involve multiple collaborators and build a polished, manager-ready business case in minutes.