I believe Jira entered an existing market, a red ocean where Bugzilla was the incumbent, and succeeded by building a better tracker and selling it through self-service instead of a sales force, and it’s since become the incumbent. It wagered that PMs were one occupant among many in a shared system of work, and that flexibility would benefit them. Linear resegmented that same red ocean. Issue tracking already existed, but Linear served the customer Jira overlooked, independent product builders who valued speed and craft over configurability. Its TAM was everyone who tracks software work, and its SOM was builders at fast-moving startups. Its wager required believing that the valuable PM is a builder working alongside engineers and has little to do with administering handoffs. Productboard created a new market. Its real competitors were spreadsheets and improvised feedback collection, so its SAM was the PMs willing to pay to solve that non-consumption. It was a blue ocean at entry, but it became more red as roadmapping tools proliferated, like Atlassian’s Jira Product Discovery. It wagered that PM is a durable specialty whose practitioners command the budget to purchase a dedicated tool, directly opposing Linear’s wager, since Linear assumed that the PM was converging with the builder, while Productboard assumed that it had its own system.
Sources: Jira (20 years of Atlassian, 20 lessons learned), Linear (Linear’s Path to Product-Market Fit), Productboard (Productboard’s Path to Product-Market Fit).
