Jira, Linear, and Productboard all sell to PMs, but they entered the market differently.
Jira is the tool most companies already use. When it launched in 2002, other bug trackers already existed, so it entered an established market and competed directly. That’s a red ocean. It won mostly because big companies could set it up however they wanted. I think Atlassian figured PMs would just use whatever the engineers were using, so they sold to engineering teams instead of PMs.
Linear is the one I find most interesting. It came out in 2019 when Jira was already everywhere, but it didn’t try to win over everyone. It went after startups that thought Jira was slow and annoying to use. That’s a resegmented market. It’s still a red ocean, but Linear found a smaller group it could really win. Linear had to believe some teams care enough about speed and a clean design that they’d give up Jira’s extra features. Seeing how many startups use it now, that seems to have been right.
Productboard wasn’t really going up against either of them. It started in 2014 as a place for PMs to collect customer feedback, figure out what to work on, and plan roadmaps. Before that, most PMs were doing this in spreadsheets and slides. So it created a new market, and it started as a blue ocean. It’s more crowded now, especially since Atlassian came out with Jira Product Discovery. Productboard had to believe PMs would pay for a tool made just for them, and that the hardest part of the job is deciding what to build.
They all sell to the same people, but each one had a different idea of what PMs actually need help with.
