All three of these companies sell to PMs, but they made very different bets about what PMs actually need.
1. Jira: Existing market, red ocean. Jira launched in 2002 as a bug and issue tracker. Atlassian’s founders were frustrated with the bug tracking software they were using, while Bugzilla was already the leading tracker. The bet was that PMs and software teams already understood the value of structured issue tracking, but wanted a more powerful, flexible tool. That put Jira directly into competition with existing products. Today, 300,000+ companies use Jira.
2. Linear: Resegmented market, red ocean. Linear was founded in 2019 and took the existing project management job but made it dramatically better for a narrow group of modern, fast-moving software teams. Founder Karri Saarinen had even built a Chrome extension at Airbnb to make Jira easier to use. Linear’s 2019 seed round was $4.2M, and its early vision was explicitly to make issue tracking and software development more enjoyable and effective. The key belief was that this group of PMs and engineers cared enough about speed, simplicity, design, and focus to leave tools like Jira behind. Today, Linear says it is used by 40,000+ companies.
3. Productboard: New market, blue ocean. Productboard was founded in 2014 and focused on a different part of the PM workflow: deciding what to build and why. PMs were piecing together customer feedback, prioritization, and roadmaps across spreadsheets, email, PowerPoint, and tools like Jira. Productboard bet that PMs needed a dedicated system for making product decisions, not just another tool for tracking execution. By 2019, 1,600+ companies were using it, and it had raised $19.7M.
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What I find most interesting is that each company found opportunity in three different ways. Jira improved the existing job, Linear narrowed the customer and optimized for what that customer valued, and Productboard redefined the job itself.
