Ignition is an AI product success platform designed to help PMMs, PMs, and other launch leaders to plan, execute, and measure the process of bringing new things to market, end-to-end.

Ignition helps you and your team become more aligned around new GTM initiatives -- whether it's a product, feature, campaign, event, or even a new company.

We use AI to help you collect and analyze all your customer & market intel, like customer calls and sales data from your CRM, and external competitive intelligence collected by Ignition. We then use that data to help:

With Ignition, you'll never have to deal with wondering what the market really wants, spending too much time crafting plans & content, chasing Eng teams for roadmap info, or writing ad-hoc stakeholder updates again.

There are a few very important steps we recommend you complete, before you start planning your build & launch process.

Ignition has a few primary areas to be aware of:

On the whole, this is what a Go-to-Market process looks like:

Ignition's real magic comes from leveraging the power of Connections to drive products from concept all the way through post-launch success though (although it is all modular, so you don't need to use any given part of Ignition). Connections allow for key context to flow through the various stages of the product build and launch process, so stakeholders at each step can track progress and understand the "why" behind plans.

Generally, this is the flow of the product lifecycle in Ignition:

Research/Insights ➡️ Product Ideas ➡️ Roadmap Items ➡️ GTM Plans ➡️ Release Notes

When any item is "Connected" to a new item, that new item inherits all the Connections from the previous item.

While each of the solutions mentioned is valuable on it’s own, the power of Ignition’s Product Management suite is how everything works together to ensure that every product release drives business impact. Let’s take a look at an example workflow.

Now that you have an better understanding of how these tools work together, let’s dive a little deeper into each one.

Collect all of your customer insights in one place by either manually adding them, uploading a CVS to your insights hub, or automating the process of identifying, extracting and summarizing customer insights by integrating your roadmaps with your CRM and other support tools like Salesforce.com, Hubspot, Intercom, and more.

Deal data that we identify and extract also includes, account/opportunity owner, company name, deal revenue, deals, and new deal, upsell/cross-sell, and retention revenue potential.

Collect product ideas from internal teams and customers to help inform your future product development. Product Ideas can be added directly within Ignition by Editors and Viewers, or you can streamline idea gathering with public idea boards that allow upvoting. Once you decide to more forward with a product idea, you can easily promote it to any roadmap.

Lastly, you can create Ignition hosted domains for both product ideas and release notes, allowing you to customize the fonts, colors, include a company logo, and even set up your own customer domain.

The product roadmap is the central source where you can easily track of all your upcoming and in-progress product development activities.

To create your first roadmap, simply click the blue “add” button in the top-right and select “roadmap”, you can then name your roadmap, click “create roadmap”, and your roadmap will be live.

(pro tip - creating multiple roadmaps is a great way to segment product activities across various audience segments, product-lines, of even product themes)

Once you have created your first roadmap, you will want to add roadmap items in order to effectively track their progress.

Within a roadmap item, you can add various information to ensure anyone reviewing the information can get a full understanding of this work. Items that can be added within a roadmap item include:

When a roadmap item requires additional features to be released as a group, you can easily add those sub-items to any roadmap item directly from the roadmap, or from within each roadmap item.

While the default list view is a popular way to view roadmaps, you can also view your roadmaps as a timeline to visualize how roadmap items will release over a period of time, or in kanban view to more easily see what the current status of various roadmap items are. Additionally, you can share your roadmaps with your internal teams by adding them as viewers to your workspace.

To help you manage the development work for your in-progress roadmap items, you can use Ignition to integrate with popular developer tools such as:

Release notes are a great way to both let your internal and external audiences know about what’s recently released. Create a draft of your release note with text, images, video and more, then choose whether to publish it for internal stakeholders, or to your public release notes page. When a release note is publish, subscribers are automatically notified via email or slack.

When you opt to "Plan a Launch" or click "New Launch", Ignition will start dynamically helping you build your launch plans. You can also create plans directly from Product releases in the Product Roadmap tab. Here's what's going to happen:

You add key Launch Team members from the "Launch Team" menu -- these are collaborators who will get edit access to the whole plan, and special notifications when plans get updated.

Launch plans in Ignition are broken into Modules. You might think of these similar to headered sections in a launch plan, if you were writing it in a simple Google Doc. However, each module is tailor-made to best house the type of information you're documenting -- for example, there's a rich timeline for mapping promotional channel plans. Modules are built independently for a few reasons:

There's one very important reason we've modularized launch plans in Ignition. The reality is that most stakeholders in the launch planning process don't need (and thus never read) the full launch plan – they each have individual bits and pieces of information that are important to them. So, we made it really easy to modularly create stakeholder updates and push them directly into people's inbox. You can even set these updates up to send on a recurring basis with the latest info.

If you'd like to share to Slack, connect your Slack instance under "Integrations" in Settings, and you'll have the ability to send Slack DM's or publish updates to Slack channels.

To share an update with a set of stakeholders:

If you'd like to export your plans, Ignition offers a couple easy ways to do this.

From the "Share Updates" screen, you can either:

Ignition is a powerful all-in-one tool for PMMs on its own, but there are a number of very important integrations Ignition supports, to help make collaborating with all those other teams across the company easier.

To manage your integrations, go to Settings, and click "Integrations". From here you can disconnect, or connect any integration in Ignition.

Ignition makes it simple to collect customer insights and competitive insights, and then tie them to your roadmaps and GTM plans. It can automate much of your work around gathering these insights, and becomes a powerful knowledge base as you start to make connections between learnings and plans and performance.

Customer Research

The customers tab is where you'll find your Personas, as well as any research or insights that inform them. There's a few things you can do here:

Competitive Intel

The Competitors tab is where you'll build automated battlecards, and conduct Win/Loss analysis to understand why you're winning or losing deals. There's a few things you can do here:

Changelogs in Ignition make it super easy to communicate recent product updates to both internal teams, and externally to customers, via private internal release note feeds and public branded release note pages. Simply set up your page and you're good to go!

Adding a new Changelog post is very simple -- you simply click "Add", write your post content, and when you're ready for it to go live, click the "Schedule" button in the top left to either set it live right away or publish it in the future.

You can start publishing internally right away, but to get your public feed live, please make sure both the "Global" and "Release Notes" pages are set to "live" in Settings.

Collecting feature ideas using Product Idea Boards

Product Idea Boards are also incredibly simple to manage. Simply set up your page and direct customers to it, and they can nominate, vote on, and discuss feature ideas.

Any nominated feature ideas will appear in your Ignition feed under Product Ideas. These can be discussed by your team, or connected to a Roadmap item or GTM plan. When you publish a comment or update status within Ignition, you can also opt to publish that comment as an email notification to all the users who have voted or commented on that feature, making it very easy to announce once things go live!

You can start publishing internally right away, but to get your public feed live, please make sure both the "Global" and "Product Ideas" pages are set to "live" in Settings.

If you've found other interesting ways to use Ignition, share them with us :). We always love hearing your feedback (both good and bad), because it helps us make the best product for you.

As always, you can reach Derek at [email protected] or (503) 901-9612 at any time of the day for any reason.