Welcome! In this getting started guide, you’ll learn the basics needed in order to successfully manage products and your build process in Ignition.
What this guide covers
How it all works together
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.
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.
Now that you have an better understanding of how these tools work together, let’s dive a little deeper into each one.
Customer Insights
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.
Product Ideas
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.
Product roadmap
The product roadmap is the central source where you can easily track of all your upcoming and in-progress product development activities.
Create a roadmap & roadmap item
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.
Updating roadmap items
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:
Description of the work
Connections to other Ignition artifacts:
Personas
Competitors
GTM plans
Product Ideas
Dependencies to other roadmap items
Attachments to product documentation and design files external to Ignition
(pro tip - connection artifacts automatically carry forward when you create a GTM plan or release note from one or more roadmap items)
Adding roadmap sub-items
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.
Roadmap views
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.
Adding developer tasks
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:
Jira
Linear
Productboard
Roadmunk
Shortcut
to request a new integration - Submit your request HERE
GTM Planning
While creating go-to-market plans may not be tied to your product roadmapping process, it's easy to kick-start the process for you product marketing team by simply selecting the roadmap items that need more planning, and with a single create a GTM launch plan with all the context carrying forward from your roadmap items.
Release Notes
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.
