What is the best way to prioritize issues in Linear?

Start with Linear's built-in Priority field for obvious work, such as production bugs and urgent customer issues. For roadmap planning and larger backlogs, use a structured scoring framework that evaluates multiple dimensions grouped by Value (Impact, Customer Signal, Strategic Alignment) and Feasibility (Readiness, Effort), plus an overall Confidence score. This creates a repeatable process that's easier to explain and defend.

How does Linear's Priority field work?

Linear provides five priority levels: Urgent, High, Medium, Low, and No Priority. Priorities can be assigned manually, edited in bulk, and used to sort or filter issues. Linear doesn't calculate priorities automatically — you decide how each issue should be ranked.

What prioritization framework works best with Linear?

There isn't a single best framework. Many teams use RICE, while others prefer custom models. CoJii supports six dimensions — Impact, Customer Signal, Strategic Alignment, Readiness, Effort, and Confidence — with preset approaches like Balanced, Growth, Customer-Led, Delivery Focus, and Strategy First as starting points. The most effective framework is one your team applies consistently and trusts when making roadmap decisions.

Should everyone involved in prioritization have a Linear account?

Not necessarily. Product managers often benefit from collecting input from customer success, sales, leadership, designers, engineers, and even customers. Ad-hoc scoring links let you collect a score from any individual without requiring a login. Campaigns let you run structured scoring rounds with groups of stakeholders. Neither requires a Linear licence.

How does CoJii work with Linear?

CoJii connects directly to your Linear workspace, imports issues, supports collaborative scoring with six customizable weighted dimensions, highlights areas of disagreement, ranks issues automatically, and syncs the results back into Linear. Priority is always synced to Linear's native Priority field. Effort estimates are optional — if your team scored effort, CoJii can write that back to the issue's size field too.

How to Prioritize Issues in Linear: A Practical Guide

Linear is excellent at tracking work. What it doesn't do is tell you what should be worked on next. This guide walks through a practical process for prioritizing issues in Linear that scales from a handful of issues to hundreds, while keeping the reasoning transparent and consistent.

As your backlog grows, every planning session becomes a tradeoff between customer requests, engineering effort, strategic goals, and competing stakeholder opinions. Linear stores your priorities, but deciding them is still your team's responsibility.

1. Start with Linear's built-in Priority field

Every Linear issue includes a Priority field with five values:

Urgent
High
Medium
Low
No Priority

This works well for quick triage:

production incidents
critical bugs
obvious customer escalations

You can set priorities manually, bulk edit them, and sort or filter your backlog by priority.

The challenge is that Linear intentionally doesn't decide the priority for you. Two product managers looking at the same issue can easily choose different priorities — and both may have valid reasons.

2. Define what "important" means for your team

Before ranking issues, agree on how your team evaluates work.

Rather than asking:

"Should this be High priority?"

break the decision into a handful of smaller questions. Dimensions are grouped into two categories:

Value — what the issue is worth

Impact — How much value does this create?
Customer Signal — How many customers are asking for it?
Strategic Alignment — How well does it support company goals?

Feasibility — how realistic it is to deliver

Readiness — Is this issue well-defined and ready to be worked on?
Effort — How much engineering work is required?

Overall

Confidence — How confident is the team in the estimates and approach?

You don't have to use all six dimensions. Teams can enable only the ones relevant to their context — a small startup may drop Readiness, while an enterprise team may weight Strategic Alignment heavily.

Contributors can also score only the dimensions they have knowledge of. Engineering fills in Effort and Readiness. Sales fills in Customer Signal. Nobody needs to score everything for the process to produce useful signal.

Breaking priority into individual dimensions makes discussions more objective and easier to explain later.

3. Weight the dimensions

Not every product team prioritizes the same way.

A startup searching for product-market fit may care most about customer demand.

A platform team may prioritize long-term strategy.

An enterprise company may emphasize delivery readiness.

Instead of treating every dimension equally, assign weights that reflect how your organization actually makes decisions. The default balanced weighting is:

Impact – 35%
Customer Signal – 20%
Strategic Alignment – 20%
Confidence – 15%
Effort – 15%
Readiness – 10%

Rather than tuning weights from scratch, teams can start from a preset approach:

Balanced — keeps all major factors in consideration
Growth — favors high-impact growth opportunities
Customer-Led — gives customer demand more influence
Delivery Focus — favors ready, lower-effort work
Strategy First — prioritizes company direction and long-term goals

The exact numbers matter less than making the decision process visible and consistent.

4. Collect input from the right people

Great prioritization rarely comes from one person.

Support understands customer pain.

Sales understands buying decisions.

Engineering understands complexity.

Leadership understands strategy.

The best backlog is built from all of these perspectives.

Unfortunately, many of those people don't have — or don't want — a Linear account.

Instead of collecting opinions across Slack messages, meetings, and spreadsheets, give contributors a structured way to score issues without requiring access to your project management tool. Two mechanisms make this practical:

Ad-hoc scoring links — send a single link to a specific person for a specific issue. They score it directly in their browser, no account required.
Campaigns — create a structured scoring round across multiple issues and send it to a group of stakeholders at once. Useful for quarterly planning or input from customer-facing teams.

5. Look for disagreement, not just averages

Most teams focus on the average score.

The biggest opportunity is often where people strongly disagree.

If Engineering scores an issue as low impact while Sales scores it as critical, that's usually a signal that assumptions need to be discussed.

Live sessions make this visible in real time — multiple people score simultaneously and the spread appears as it happens, rather than only after collection is complete. This turns a scoring round into an active conversation rather than an asynchronous survey.

Surfacing disagreement early leads to better conversations and better prioritization decisions.

Consensus isn't about everyone giving the same score — it's about understanding why they didn't.

6. Rank your backlog

Once scores have been collected:

check dimension coverage — each issue shows which dimensions have been scored and which haven't, so you know how complete the signal is before acting on a ranking
calculate the weighted score
rank issues
review outliers
discuss disagreements
make any intentional adjustments

Your highest-ranked issue isn't automatically the next thing to build.

Instead, your team now has a transparent starting point backed by shared reasoning rather than individual opinion.

7. Sync the final priorities back to Linear

Once you've agreed on priorities, CoJii can write two fields back to Linear:

Priority — always synced. CoJii maps its ranked recommendation to Linear's native Priority field (Urgent / High / Medium / Low / No Priority) so your backlog, boards, filters, and workflows continue working exactly as they do today.
Effort estimate — optional. If your team scored effort during prioritization, CoJii can write that estimate back to the issue's size field in Linear, keeping your capacity planning in sync without extra manual updates.

Everything else — title, description, labels, assignees, cycle membership — is read-only. CoJii never modifies fields it doesn't own.

How CoJii fits in

CoJii extends Linear with collaborative prioritization.

Instead of debating priorities in meetings or maintaining scoring spreadsheets, your team can:

Import issues directly from Linear.
Score them collaboratively using six customizable dimensions grouped by Value and Feasibility.
Enable only the dimensions that matter to your team.
Invite teammates and stakeholders without requiring a Linear seat.
Use ad-hoc scoring links to collect input from individuals on specific issues.
Run campaigns to gather structured input from stakeholders across multiple issues at once.
Run live scoring sessions where teams score together in real time.
See where people agree — and where they don't.
See dimension-level coverage per issue so you know how complete each score is.
Automatically calculate weighted rankings.
Sync the final priorities back into Linear with a single click.

Linear remains your system of record.

CoJii helps your team make better prioritization decisions.

How to Prioritize Issues in Linear