Looking at Jira, Linear, and Productboard, I think what’s interesting is that they all sell to pretty similar people, but made very different bets about the market.
Jira entered an existing market and a red ocean. Issue and bug tracking already existed, so Jira wasn’t really convincing teams that they had a new problem. The bet was more that teams already needed a way to organize and track work, and Jira could do that better than what was available.
Linear feels like a resegmented market, but still a red ocean. It does a lot of the same core things as Jira, but it went after a more specific type of customer: product and engineering teams that wanted something faster, simpler, and honestly less painful to use. Linear had to believe that there were enough teams frustrated with how bloated existing tools felt that they would actually switch for a better experience.
Productboard is the one I’d put in a new market/blue ocean. Instead of helping PMs track work after deciding what to build, it focused on the decisions before that: understanding users, prioritizing ideas, and figuring out what should go on the roadmap. Its bet was that this part of a PM’s job was important enough to deserve its own product, rather than living across spreadsheets, docs, Jira, and random notes.
So to me, the difference is basically: Jira competed in an existing category, Linear narrowed and improved it, and Productboard tried to create a new one.
