Connections: How It All Fits Together
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 ➡️ Product Ideas ➡️ Roadmap Items ➡️ GTM Plans ➡️ Release Notes
Insights (your learnings) turn into Personas, Competitors, and Product Ideas
Product Ideas turn into Roadmap Items (the features you plan to build)
Roadmap Items are packaged up into Releases (the update you plan to ship)
Roadmap Items will also often have Personas, Competitors, Product Ideas, and Inisghts connected to them, for context.
Roadmap Items will also often be connected to Engineering Tasks (the specific tasks your Eng team needs to complete to build the feature)
Roadmap Items turn into GTM Plans (the launch plan for the customer-facing announcement of a product or feature)
GTM Plans will inherit all the Connections from the Roadmap Items
GTM Plans turn into Release Notes (the customer-facing communication of the new product or feature)
When any item is "Connected" to a new item, that new item inherits all the Connections from the previous item.
How it all works together
While each of the solutions mentioned is valuable on it’s own, the power of Ignition’s suite is how everything works together to ensure that every product release drives business impact. Let’s take a look at an example workflow.
Voice of Customer Insights – Your raw customer learnings.
Insights enable you to centralize your research and collect all of your customer feedback from messy data like sales deal notes and customer conversations. Typically Insights will be the raw data which you'll analyze (or use Ignition's AI) to identify new product ideas.
Product ideas – Your feature backlog.
Ideas let you create a backlog of feature ideas and collect feedback on them, to help identify what to build. Ideas can be collected via feature voting boards which can be hosted in Ignition or on public pages, or by integrating into your CRM and customer conversations and allowing Ignition's AI to automatically create and extract feature ideas. When an idea is ready to be built, you promote it into a roadmap item.
Roadmaps – What you plan to build.
Roadmaps are where you can prioritize and manage the features you're going to build. This is where you'll create a source of truth for what's shipping, when -- and use Connections to append context like the feature ideas, insights, or personas that form the "why" behind what you're building. Roadmap Items (e.g. features) can be attached to Releases to package up what's shipping, when. For roadmap items you plan to do a customer-facing announcement around, you can package them up into a GTM Plan.
GTM Plans – Customer-facing announcement plans.
GTM plans allow you to plan and orchestrate the go-to-market planning portion of your launch, such as setting objectives, planning positioning/messaging, and managing timelines, assets, and tasks. When creating a GTM plan from a roadmap item, all your context (Connections) will be handed off instantly to the Product Marketing team. Once you're ready to announce the feature to customers, you can create a release note.
Release notes – "The announcement"
Release notes are a quick and easy way to publish the announcement of your new product or feature to internal teams (inside Ignition) or externally to customers (on public release notes pages). Once a release note is published publicly, customers that subscribe to your page will be automatically notified of the release.