Jira was successful in a pre-existing domain that already had a proven problem and already had proven competitors. In 2002 they entered the bug tracking market and competitors like Bugzilla were already in it. However, it won with the existing market way and they were a faster, better and cheaper tool that any team could buy and was able to use without a sales call. In order for their bet to make sense, they essentially had to believe that the PMs would use whatever their engineers adopted, since their role is coordinating engineering work.
Linear is a little bit of blue inside a red ocean because it fundamentally sells the same basic product as Jira. They both cover issues, sprints and roadmaps, so it isn’t a new market. However, Linear is aimed at a more narrow customer. Linear sells to their customers the advantage of better taste and more speed. However, the wider market is still red and there are a lot of different competitors but linear found a smaller submarket to target and therefore that’s their blue patch. They had to believe in order for this to work that some product managers or engineers would want to trade customization for an opinionated and fast workflow.
Productboard is a new market so it’s currently in a blue ocean but that ocean is turning red. They created a tool for all the work before tickets even exist so they help with things like collecting customer feedback, prioritizing and mapping out a roadmap. Before this, product managers did this in spreadsheets and slides. In order for their bet to make sense, product managers had to believe that deciding what to build is a separate job from everything else, and that they needed to invest in a tool purely for it.
