Whiteboard for Linear

  • Łukasz Sągol
    Łukasz Sągol
    Co-founder
  • Peter Parkes
    Peter Parkes
    Co-founder

Linear is an awesome product management tool with impressive realtime performance, but it doesn’t give you a way to work ‘live’ with your team. That’s where Qualdesk comes in.

Qualdesk is a whiteboard designed for Linear. It lets you:

  1. Work with Linear issues on a 2D whiteboard
  2. Collaborate ‘live’ with people on your team, with live cursors and live typing
  3. Take action on Linear issues directly from the whiteboard
  4. Transform stickies into Linear issues
  5. Create hotspots to automate Linear actions

1 Work with Linear issues on a 2D whiteboard

Qualdesk makes it easy to work in a more flexible way with your content from Linear, making it easier to:

  • Plan cycles visually
  • Arrange issues into groups or clusters
  • Add labels, annotations and images

Drag and drop issues from Linear to a whiteboard in Qualdesk

Getting Linear issues on to a Qualdesk board is easy. You can browse and search in the sidebar, and then simply drag and drop the issues you want on to the board.

2 Collaborate live with people on your team

Live multiplayer Linear in Qualdesk

No more screensharing Linear. With Qualdesk you get:

  • Live multiplayer cursors: see what your team members are pointing at, and run interactive planning sessions and discussions
  • Live typing: just like in Google Docs, you can see your team members type as they edit issue titles

3 Take action on Linear issues directly from the whiteboard

With the Linear integration in Qualdesk you can:

  • Update status (backlog, to do, in progress, done)
  • Assign people
  • Add and remove labels
  • Change cycle
  • Change priority
  • Change project

Adding an label to a Linear issue using Qualdesk

You can work with individual issues, or update multiple issues at once. Simply select them on the board and use the mini-sidebar or right click to make changes.

4 Transform stickies into Linear issues

With a couple of clicks, you can turn a sticky note or card on a Qualdesk board into a Linear issue. This is ideal for:

  • Writing up potential bugs and agreeing as a team which ones should go into Linear
  • Turning follow-up actions from retrospectives into tasks in Linear
  • Drafting user stories for a new feature on a whiteboard and converting them into issues in Linear

Convert a sticky note into a Linear issue using Qualdesk

As with all other Linear actions, you can do this one sticky or card at a time, or in bulk by selecting multiple items.

You can also use this feature to convert Trello cards to Linear issues, convert Jira issues to Linear issues and to convert rows in Google Sheets to Linear issues.

5 Create hotspots to automate Linear actions

You can add actions to groups in Qualdesk to create multiplayer visual workflows for Linear. Here’s how it works:

  1. Press G or select the Draw Group tool in the toolbar
  2. Draw a group
  3. Click Add an action and choose Linear actions

Using this, you can create a hotspot on the board to:

  • add Linear issues to a cycle
  • assign Linear issues
  • set Linear issue status
  • set Linear issue priority
  • convert sticky notes and cards to Linear

As with all other Linear actions, you can do this one at a time or in bulk. Read more about group actions for Linear in the release note.