What stood out to me is that these three companies are not just selling different tools. They made different bets about how mature the PM market already was.
Jira entered an existing market and a red ocean. Issue and project tracking already existed, so Jira did not need to convince teams that the problem was real. Its bet was that, as teams became larger and work became more complex, PMs would want more coordination, context, and control. Today, Jira keeps extending that mature business into broader workflows and agents.
Linear entered a resegmented market. It is a much newer company, and instead of trying to serve everyone, it started with a narrower group of modern software teams. Its bet was that some PMs and engineers were dissatisfied enough with heavy tools like Jira to switch for speed, simplicity, and a better experience. It is still in a red ocean, but it found a relatively blue pocket inside it. Its move toward agent-based work also feels like an extension of that original bet.
Productboard made the clearest blue-ocean bet. It treated understanding customer needs, prioritizing, and deciding what to build as a separate PM problem, not just an extension of execution. But this blue ocean is becoming redder: Jira Product Discovery and similar tools now compete much more directly with it.
