I believe that Jira entered an existing market when it came out and found its success by making a solution for the same market but cheaper, self-serve, and user-friendly. While Jira is now considered the ‘incumbent’ in this market, it was actually even named after its precursor, Mozilla’s Bugzilla tool vs. Gojira which in full is the Japanese translation of Godzilla. ClearQuest was another alternative enterprise tool, but was sold at a high price point. However, ultimately I don’t feel that Jira was resegmenting the market here, but rather outperformed existing products to capture the existing market at a lower price point. While this may have originally resulted in some degree of resegmentation on the basis of price point (or from some perspectives a new market with the rollout of Agile), most companies view Jira as an industry standard for PMs now. (Sources: Bugzilla, ClearQuest)
Comparatively, Linear entered the market through resegmentation, though in more of a red ocean. Linear competed on speed and targeted PMs, rather than enterprises more holistically. “Where Jira gives you a thousand configuration options [..] Linear gives you strong defaults” (The Case for Linear). Linear represented an alternative with “opinionated workflows,” or rather, predetermined routes for completing work and reducing bloat. This novelty in their approach won them a market despite pre-existing tools.
Lastly, Productboard resegments once again, toward a new market. Productboard starts from customer feedback and works toward roadmaps, which was distinct from existing PM tools. This shifted paradigm emphasized the importance of feedback and prioritization, and marketed more to the niche of PMs by answering the question of why. (Productboard) While this may have originally seemed to be somewhat of a blue ocean, Atlassian released Jira Discovery in 2023, arguably to compete in this new portion of the market. (Atlassian: Jira Discovery vs. Productboard)
