Blue Ocean Strategy
Most companies compete on the same things. The biggest wins come from choosing to compete on something different entirely.
Why PMs should care
A red ocean is a crowded market where every competitor fights on the same few features. Customers can barely tell the products apart, and everyone's margins get thinner every quarter. A blue ocean is a market you redefine — you deliberately score low on the things everyone says matter, and high on things nobody else is offering.
It sounds simple. In practice it's uncomfortable. Most strategy workshops end up matching competitors feature-for-feature and adding one more on top. Blue ocean thinking asks the opposite question: 'what would we remove?' and 'what would we deliberately be worst at?' Those are questions that most roadmap reviews don't know how to handle — because saying 'we won't do X' sounds like weakness, even when it's the whole strategy.
Example in product work
Pie investing — fractional, thematic baskets of stocks like 'Mag 7', 'Dividend Dogs', 'Clean Energy' — deliberately ignored the attributes every broker had been competing on for 20 years: research depth, order types, margin products, Level II data.
Instead it competed on a new axis: 'make investing feel like building a playlist on Spotify'. The product was, in traditional broker terms, shallow. But it pulled in a generation of users who'd never have opened an account somewhere that asked them to choose between a limit order and a stop-loss on their first screen.
A red-ocean broker would have added pies as feature 47 and buried them in a submenu. The blue-ocean version made them the entire homepage.
What to do when you see it
- Red oceans are crowded markets where everyone fights on the same few features and margins get squeezed every quarter.
- Blue oceans are markets you redefine — score low on things everyone says matter, high on things nobody else is offering.
- Most strategy workshops default to matching competitors feature-for-feature. Blue ocean thinking asks the opposite: 'what would we remove?' and 'what would we deliberately be worst at?'
- These are uncomfortable questions. Saying 'we won't do X' sounds like weakness, even when it's the whole strategy.
Sources & further reading
- Blue Ocean Strategy — Kim & Mauborgne, HBR, 2004The original Harvard Business Review article that introduced the red ocean / blue ocean framing.
- Blue Ocean Strategy — the official siteKim & Mauborgne's own site with the strategy canvas, ERRC grid, and case studies.