Jira, Linear, and ProductBoard are all products that are useful to PMs, but entered the market at different times and serve different functions.
Jira started off as a “purely issue tracking software” for software developers in 2002, but developed into a flexible project management tool in later years. It launched in the backdrop of the dot-com bust, but the collapse of internet hype hadn’t eliminated software teams’ need for practical development tools. It entered an existing market and a red ocean: many other issue tracking services were available at the time, such as SysAid and Bugzilla. As Jira expanded into project management, its bet about PMs was that they would value a shared system for coordinating engineering work and tracking progress.
Purposefully built for product teams, Linear was publicly launched in 2020 to be a simpler and faster version of Jira, as remote work started increasing in popularity. Linear entered a re-segmented market and a red ocean, competing for existing demand served by Jira and similar project management tools. Its bet about PMs was that they would want faster, simpler, and more opinionated workflows compared to what tools like Jira could offer, especially when it came to reducing “enterprise bloat.”
Productboard sits adjacent to these two and supports product managers specifically on helping product discovery, customer feedback aggregation, and roadmapping. There were a few products similar to Productboard in the 2010s, like Aha!, but they controlled different parts of the PM workflow. Therefore, it entered a re-segmented market in a blue ocean. Its bet was that PMs would pay for a dedicated system connecting customer needs to product decisions, even if they already used an issue tracker.
