Jira entered the existing market of bug-tracking tools for software developers in 2002. It was playing in a red ocean, competing with other bug trackers like Bugzilla for the same users. To establish itself in the market, Jira introduced a new self-service model that made it possible to buy enterprise software online and took a bottom-up product-led growth approach. When expanding to target product managers, Jira believed that there were tasks to be tracked in the product development life cycle beyond bugs, which translated into more general work issues/items.
Linear launched in 2020, entering a resegmented market. It identified a specific niche, that is, individual contributors at small companies/startups, that weren’t being served well by incumbents like Jira that were complex and customizable, rather than simple, fast, and straightforward to use. Here, the belief was that because product management depends on the success of ICs (e.g. engineers, designers, PMs) who work best when the friction and frustration of task tracking is eliminated, they will be willing to give up fully customizable workflows for a simple opinionated experience that works.
Productboard took a different approach and entered a new market without existing competitors (and thus was a blue ocean) when it launched around 2016. While other product management tools like Jira and Asana focused on downstream task management, Productboard zeroed in on the discovery stage, guided by the belief that the primary work of product management isn’t centered on managing workstreams and completing tasks, but actually capturing customer needs and determining what the right products to build are.
