There are three kinds of markets we explored in class: an existing market where many companies already compete, a resegmented market where companies target a niche within a larger market, and a new market.
Jira entered a resegmented market, with some blue-ocean characteristics. Jira initially targeted a specific developer profile, building from Atlassian’s existing service work for software companies. Its Australian origins also meant less competition, despite a smaller technology ecosystem. Crucially, Jira bet that developers would self-serve and discover the product independently. Its expansion strategy then let adoption spread beyond developers into other teams.
Linear entered an existing, red-ocean market. Jira was already deeply established alongside GitHub and others. Linear’s bet was that engineers and ICs frustrated with existing tools wanted something faster and more product-focused. Its private beta deliberately shaped this niche. Linear had to believe those frustrations were strong enough to overcome the inertia of existing tools and drive adoption.
Productboard also entered an existing, red-ocean market, though its segmentation was less clear-cut. Rather than centering the workflow around tasks, it positioned itself as more product-manager- and user-centric, relying on PM adoption to spread the product across their teams.
What I find clever is that none of these companies needed to convince the entire market to switch at once. But their strategies also share a weakness: they depend on a particular user having enough influence to drive adoption. Particularly with Jira’s initial user target of open-source developers, what assurance is there that self-service and independent adoption would secure more adoption propagated through that user’s network? In my opinion, companies should identify where adoption actually gets blocked—by management, existing workflows, or cross-functional dependencies—and design the product and go-to-market strategy around that constraint.
