Jira: Jira is considered widely adopted across enterprises and provides a very customization-heavy approach to tools for PMs. Overall, Jira’s belief on PMs centered around the fact that: 1) PMs wanted customization and flexibility in their tools 2) existing tools in 2002 did not fully address PM concerns. Though it is a prominent player, Jira was built within a red ocean with an existing market. Atlassian, the company behind Jira, notes that it entered the market when its competitor Bugzilla was the most popular solution [1]. Its competitive advantages were improved features and new affordances, rather than redefining the market itself.
Linear: Linear was built in 2019 with an assumption that countered Jira’s and those of competitors in the PM tooling space. Rather than believing in configuration and complexity, Linear’s belief of PMs is that they wanted reduced overhead and efficiency, believing that the traditional approach of “issue tracking [was] dead” [2]. Linear is a resegmented market, bringing a new perspective that is “fundamentally reshaping” the market [3]. However, it occupies a red ocean as it has direct competitors including Jira and owns only the efficiency-forward distinction.
Productboard: Compared to the previous two tools, Productboard focuses on customers rather than company internals. The tool believes that previous tools do not help PMs collect customer-facing data and prioritize user needs. Productboard combines the functionality of tools such as Slack, Google Doc, and Mechanical Turk into a new category of tool for PM workflows. As Productboard addresses a new segment of PM-related issues, its positioning allows it to gain a new market that is a blue ocean. Productboard does not directly compete against legacy products like Jira, and instead addresses new needs.
Overall, Jira, Linear, and Productboard take on three different approaches to building products for project management.
References:
[1] 20 years of Atlassian, 20 lessons learned
[2] Issue tracking is dead – Linear
[3] About – Linear
[4] https://www.productboard.com/understand-what-users-really-need/
