Managing launches in Ignition
Ignition helps with launching products and campaigns in three primary ways. For smaller releases that don’t warrant a full GTM campaign, Ignition allows you to easily publish bite-sized Release Notes for both customers and internal teammates. For bigger announcements which require more go-to-market orchestration, Ignition uses AI to help build best-practice-based GTM plans and enable internal teams to sell. And, no matter what you’re launching, Ignition’s AI copywriting tools make it simple to quickly generate on-message content to feed all your marketing channels for the announcement.
👨🚀 The more context you give Ignition, the better your outputs — try using Connections to attach research, roadmap info, and personas to your plans, and Ignition will factor them in as we generate your plans and content.
Release notes — Communicating what’s shipped and smaller updates
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. These are designed primarily to communicate nitty-gritty feature updates which may not warrant a larger campaign plan. 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.
“Internal” release notes will be visible only inside Ignition — these are useful for communicating change to your teammates privately, such as collaborating between Product and Product Marketing.
”Public” release notes are visible on your public page — these are useful for communicating change to customers, or teammates like Sales who prefer not to login to Ignition.
Subscribers to will be notified whenever a new release note is published, automatically.
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. Public pages set to Private will be visible only to viewers with the direct link to the page, and can be password-protected to allow for sharing with individual customers.
Campaigns — Planning and orchestrating go-to-market for larger announcements
Campaigns are designed to help create a repeatable, enablement-first motion for new market announcements. Campaigns can be used to plan anything that involves a customer-facing announcement — product launches, global market expansions, pricing updates, or even simple brand campaigns to introduce a new message.
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 enter the basic details about your launch requested on the modal.
👨🚀 The selections you make here will help dynamically adjust the launch plan Ignition recommends to you if you activate Copilot.
Ignition will recommend a planning template to you, based on your launch's Type, and Tier. You can also opt to build your own plan from scratch, or from a template you've created if you prefer.
👨🚀 Once you're in the plan, you'll also notice the option to "Build with Copilot". By selecting this, you can have Copilot automatically populate Channel, Asset, and Project plans, based on your launch type, tier, launch date, and more. If you'd like to adjust the default outputs, just email us!
You'll be dropped into your Launch Plan. Launches consist of a few key elements:
Launch dashboard -- This is the main dashboard for your launch. It's a snapshot of launch readiness, important timelines, and critical next actions.
👨🚀 Launch phases are an important concept in Ignition — customize, then migrate your launch through phases as you progress, to easily manage approvals and communications to key stakeholders.
👨🚀 Try connecting roadmap items from Jira to the Product Status section to create a unified view of progress towards launch across product & GTM.
Launch plan -- This is where all your strategy and execution will be created and collaborated on.
Objectives -- Here you can set up OKRs, and track performance with analytics integrations.
GTM timeline -- This is your master calendar, where you can map out overall GTM milestones, channel activity supporting the launch, and task timelines. In the Product Status tab you can track connected product task progress.
Launch brief – This is where you document your strategy. You'll find specialized modules for every important piece of planning documentation.
👨🚀 Within each module, you’ll also find AI support to help you instantly craft best-practice based objectives, positioning statements, messaging, and more.
Copy & assets – This is where you house, review, and approve assets. You can store copy, files, or links to documents here, and tag them to promotional channels so you know which are tied to what activity.
Tasks – This is where you track your pre-launch, launch day, and post-launch Go-to-Market tasks. Tasks are organized by custom tags by default, but you can group or sort them by assignee, status, and more.
Tools — This is where tools to help make your launch planning and execution easier will live.
AI copywriting — This is where you can use AI to create content for your campaign plan, based on the messaging included in it. We’ll auto-populate recommended assets based on the channels you’re using, messaging from your launch brief, and use any Connections to refine results. The content you create can then be easily exported to the campaign’s asset library.
Internal comms — This is where you can easily share status updates with stakeholders either individually or by automating updates to a Slack channel. Share just the right info with just the right people with modular sharing.
Retrospectives — This is where you can run post-launch retrospective surveys to assess how well-enabled your team felt around the launch, and identify opportunities for process improvement going forward.
Connections -- This is where all your connected items from other areas of Ignition will live. Context inherited from roadmap items, external release notes, etc.
Double-check your plan structure and customize it. If you want to add, or rearrange modules in the Launch Brief -- you can do so in the left navigation bar by drag/dropping them, or clicking the plus sign to add section dividers.
Fill in your GTM plans as you normally would!
👨🚀 Pro tip: Try typing "/" or "@" in text editor fields, and it will pull up more advanced editing options, including an AI writing assistant powered by AI.
Once your plans are completed (or at a shareable state), you can easily share modular status updates with the "Share Update" button. Or just publish your Mission Control page to the team.
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.
We recommend focusing on "point" contacts here -- for example, the leads from Product, Marketing, Comms, Customer Success, and Design.
Launch Modules & Copilot
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:
Modular sharing – Using the "Share Update" button, you can share just the modules relevant to specific stakeholders. Or, publish public pages with certain module elements hidden.
👨🚀 Copilot – Copilot are Ignition's workflows to help you build stronger plans, faster. We've embedded best practice-based frameworks into the product, and are currently building AI to integrate them even more tightly into your workflow. For modules which have a Copilot flow (we're building more soon!), you can access them from "Copilot" button in the top-left when it's highlighted, or from the prompt at the bottom of the module.
AI Copywriting — Create on-message content refined using your data
AI copywriting is fairly straightforward to use, and helps you instantly create entire campaigns’ worth of content, all refined based on your company’s brand, specific campaign messaging, and the language your customers use.
👨🚀 The more context you give Ignition, the better your outputs will be! We’ll pull a lot of this automatically, but try connecting Voice of Customer data, and filling in details on your company’s brand voice and messaging, to improve your outputs.
To create content using AI copywriting, simply select the format(s) you’d like to create (hint: Campaigns allows you to create 1-to-many assets using a single set of messaging to create many different formats all at once). Once you’ve selected your formats, simply enter the details about the product you want to promote, and attach any inputs you’d like the AI to take into account, such as personas to message towards or competitors to message against, and we’ll write your content. From there, simply select “Export” to save your content into your Asset Library — select the specific asset card you’d like the content saved to and we’ll do the rest.