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Build – Ideating and prioritizing roadmaps
Build – Ideating and prioritizing roadmaps

Managing ideas, roadmaps, and product development

Derek Osgood avatar
Written by Derek Osgood
Updated over 7 months ago

Managing your build process in Ignition

Ignition's Build section is designed to help you collect and prioritize ideas for new products and features, then build and share your roadmap. What makes it extra powerful is how it uses connectivity into your CRM and Voice of Customer data, combined with AI, to extract ideas and marry them to revenue impact data – allowing you to prioritize based on revenue impact, and also more easily close the loop with Sales by automatically notifying reps when features ship. Roadmaps can be shared with flexible views, and customized using your own prioritization frameworks. The Build section is also where you'll be able to collaborate with dev teams, by integrating with the ticketing tools they use like Jira.

  • 👨‍🚀 Integrating your CRM will enable *much* more powerful roadmapping – our AI can automatically extract feature ideas blocking deals, map deals to roadmap items, and automatically notify sales reps of accounts to upsell when relevant features ship.

Ideas – Collect customer feedback and build your backlog with AI

The Ideas tab in Ignition is where you'll manage your backlog of product ideas that you *might* build someday. It's your workbench to collect ideas, discuss feedback, and collect inputs like votes and revenue details for how impactful something might be to build.

There are a few ways to collect ideas in Ignition:

  • Automatic idea extraction with AI – By turning on the Product Gaps feature, Ignition's AI will automatically analyze your integrated data and identify features customers have asked for. We'll add them to your idea board, categorize them, and even map the customer accounts that are relevant to them to the Idea, so you can prioritize based on the potential revenue impact they can influence. Go to Settings > Integrations and connect your CRM, call transcription tools, or Slack.

  • Collecting ideas via public idea boards – Public idea boards allow you to share a public board with customers or teammates where they can nominate, vote on, and discuss feature ideas. Idea boards can be password-protected and marked as private as well, so they're visible only to the folks you want to see them. To configure your ideas board, go to Settings > Build > Ideas and toggle both the global and specific board pages live.

Once Ideas are on your board, you can easily add or remove them from public boards by marking them "public" or not. 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!

  • 👨‍🚀 When an idea with Deals attached to it is marked "done", Ignition will automatically notify the sales rep who owns the deal, making it dead simple to ensure revenue opportunity gets captured!

When you're ready to actually build your Idea, simply promote it to the Roadmap, and we'll connect all the relevant context like the idea and any associated deals.

Roadmap – Prioritize and share your roadmap to revenue

Roadmaps are where you'll prioritize and communicate the strategic roadmap of features you actually plan to build.

Roadmap basics

You can easily create multiple roadmaps (try creating one for each product line), and slice/dice views across them by using the Display settings to group and filter features in different views. Views can be saved for use by other teammates, and shared publicly via public pages. Using the Display option, you can also control what columns are visible toggle between List, Timeline, and Kanban views for different visualizations of your work.

Typically, each Roadmap Item will be a feature you plan to build, and then you might add sub-items for smaller sub-features as well. By clicking into the detailed view for any Roadmap Item, you can add lots of extra context and detail by attaching Ideas, Insights, Deals, or other elements from across Ignition. You can also set up dependencies with other Roadmap Items.

Releases are categorization objects meant to capture the version or release that a number of features will be released in.

Customizing roadmap parameters

For extra customization, try going to your Build > Roadmap settings to configure alternate value/effort prioritization frameworks, customize the statuses used on your roadmap, and manage Releases.

Integrating with Jira and other issue trackers

Roadmaps can be easily synced with issue trackers like Jira, Linear, and Zoho Sprints. By integrating these tools, you can track progress for roadmap items by adding tickets to any roadmap item. You can also use the "Create ticket" feature to generate Jira tickets using AI from within Ignition.

Moving to launch

When you're ready to launch your feature, Ignition helps with this communication in multiple ways:

  • Automatically notifying Sales – If you have a Deal appended to a roadmap item, we'll automatically notify the rep responsible for that Deal, when the feature is marked as "done".

  • Publishing release notes – For smaller releases, it's easy to publish a release note either internally or to your public release notes board.

  • Creating a Launch Campaign – For larger features and announcements, you can select one or more features from your roadmap, and package them into a GTM plan to orchestrate a complete launch initiative.

  • 👨‍🚀 When you promote Roadmap Items to GTM Plans, we'll automatically carry through appended context, so your GTM plan's AI recommendations will be based on the personas and insights that informed your build process!

Dev Tasks – Connect your roadmaps to your dev team's work

By connecting your issue tracker like Jira, Linear, or Zoho Sprints, you can easily import and visualize all the development work going on with your Engineering team.

The Dev Tasks tab will provide a quick-reference view of whatever is going on in Jira. But, within any Roadmap Item, you can also append tickets to sync status, or even create Jira tickets directly from the Roadmap.

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