Announcing Ignition 2.0 and Ignition's Master Plan

‍

Today marks an exciting milestone for Ignition as we launch Ignition 2.0 (for those 90's kids out there, you can think of it as the remix to Ignition, hot and fresh out the kitchen 😉).  It’s a completely revamped version of our AI Product Success Platform that brings us one giant leap closer to fully realizing our vision for a world where the entire chaotic process of bringing new things to market is truly unified and automated.

‍

Ignition 2.0 isn't just a new coat of paint - it's a wildly more intuitive and stable user experience compared to our previous beta and 1.0 versions. But more importantly, it's the first truly "complete" version of our platform that enables managing the full product lifecycle end-to-end.

‍

With this release, Ignition becomes the first product management platform built for holistic, revenue-driven product management. It combines the critical workflows for product managers to identify, prioritize, and manage building products, with the product marketing workflows to commercialize them via positioning, messaging, go-to-market plans, and content.

‍

We've infused AI into every part of the product lifecycle to help product teams build what sells and align customer teams to sell what they built. Let's rewind and look at how Ignition has evolved over the years and why we built it in the first place.

‍

The Evolution of Ignition

Many people who have followed Ignition from the beginning probably still think of us primarily as a product launch platform. But Ignition was always built with the intent of creating the "Rippling for product" - a compound startup that combines the individual workflows for each critical part of managing products, tied to an underlying system of record that drives automation.

‍

Our goal has always been to solve the problem of fragmentation between product management and product marketing by providing a unified place to research, build, launch products, and enable teams to sell and measure success. But building an end-to-end solution is hard to do quickly.

‍

So we started by tackling one of the most painful parts of the process for product marketers - orchestrating product launches. While there are lots of great product management tools for roadmapping, product marketing teams are super underserved when it comes to tools. And effective go-to-market is one of the most important drivers of product success.

‍

The MVP version of Ignition was a simple go-to-market planning tool for launching products. It was essentially a fancy modular doc to help enable sales and success teams with easier sharing of just the right status updates at the right times.

‍

From there, it evolved to include more product communication tools like internal and public release notes, as well as more fleshed out go-to-market planning features like asset management and project management.

‍

But the goal was always to help not just with launching products, but to collect all the inputs that inform both the marketing and product planning that drives success. We wanted to use that data to help generate better plans with the power of AI.

‍

So we started building competitive intelligence and voice of customer tools to analyze external market data and mine insights from customer conversations happening across the org. We also began developing roadmapping and idea management tools to help PMs prioritize what to build and align with product marketing.

‍

However, even just 2-3 months ago, these tools operated more as disparate point solutions rather than a unified, intuitive workflow. You had a workbench to perform various tasks, but the connective tissue and flow between stages was lacking.

Introducing a Unified Product Success Workflow

Now with Ignition 2.0, we've fully connected the end-to-end workflow and turned Ignition into one big AI brain for product management.

• We help you collect research that informs planning, from competitive intel to customer feedback
• We use AI to continuously analyze that data, extract insights, and organize them
• We automatically categorize insights, identify high-impact feature ideas, and instantly add them to roadmaps
• As roadmap items move through the go-to-market process, we carry forward all the initial insight context
• We use the accumulated data to generate optimal go-to-market plans and marketing content
• We enable customer-facing teams by automatically surfacing opportunities to them in their CRM

If you tried Ignition even as recently as a month ago, you may have had a less-than-stellar experience. Things were often buggy, unstable, or unintuitive. Our AI outputs could be hit-or-miss. Onboarding was confusing. Pulling a page out of Domino's Pizza’s book, we need to be real and admit the experience wasn’t great.

‍

In our drive to ship product quickly, the user experience and output quality suffered at times. But with Ignition 2.0, we can confidently say the entire platform is exponentially better from a stability, workflow, usability, and quality perspective. It's now truly magical, and enterprise-grade.

‍

If you haven't checked it out in the past few weeks, we highly recommend giving it another spin. You'll be blown away by the difference.

‍

‍

Ignition vs. Legacy Product Management Tools

How is Ignition really different from traditional product management tools?

‍

Ignition is the only product management tool actually built to drive revenue. Most legacy tools take a myopic view, focusing exclusively on building the product while ignoring the arguably more important part - commercializing it effectively.

‍

In other words, they're designed for interfacing with Engineering rather than Sales and Marketing. As such, most are basically glorified project management tools with light voice-of-customer analysis bolted on. They help organize plans for what's getting built, but do little to drive go-to-market.

‍

These tools have limited, if any, integration with the systems that marketing and sales teams live in day-to-day, like CRMs and digital asset management. They lack robust launch planning capabilities to empower more effective product marketing.

‍

Additionally, their AI workflows tend to be limited and tacked on as an afterthought, often using inferior models. Because they only contain partial context (the roadmap) rather than Ignition's holistic view spanning product hierarchy, messaging, competitive landscape, etc., they can't power AI at every step of the go-to-market process.

‍

The context simply isn't there to generate truly effective insights, plans, and content. Ignition, on the other hand, thinks about product management holistically:

• We provide robust roadmapping tools that integrate with Jira and other engineering systems to cover the building side
• But we also give a unified place to plan launches, manage collateral, and enable Sales to cover the business side
• We're enablement-first, designed to push information outward to teams that need it vs. forcing adoption
• We're end-to-end, covering research, build, launch, and ongoing enablement to sell and measure results
• We're automation-first, helping collect data, categorize it, identify opportunities, generate plans and content, and push intel to teams
• We use best-in-class AI models combined with workflow in a way no other tool does

"Ignition helps us stay on top of customer feedback, at scale. It gives us the power to make product decisions and communicate them effectively to our stakeholders." Anthony Varalese - Director of Product, Worldstrides

The Ignition Master Plan

Our ultimate goal with Ignition is to automate the entire process of bringing new products and campaigns to market. We’ve been methodical in building the platform in phases:

1. Build a platform to HOUSE all the data (roadmapping, documentation, asset management, project management)
2. Add tools to COLLECT the data (competitive intel, voice-of-customer, integrations with sales/marketing systems)
3. Start CONNECTING WORKFLOWS across the data (ideas flow to roadmaps, to GTM plans, to cross-functional teams)
4. BUILD THE AI BRAIN on the data (unify data to inform AI that automates workflows happening under the hood)
5. POLISH everything (go from functional to delightful, relentlessly focusing on amazing user experience)

This release marks the completion of steps 1-5. We now have a platform for researching, building, and launching products. But we're far from done. Here's what's coming next:

6. Amp up ENABLEMENT (make Ignition data easily accessible to Sales via dynamic tools that power real-time suggestions)
7. Automate CUSTOMER COMMUNICATION (translate internal documentation and collateral into automated customer-facing comms)
8. Provide REAL-TIME RECOMMENDATIONS (recognize patterns to provide dynamic optimizations that maximize success)

We know adopting Ignition all at once can feel like a heavy lift, which is why we've made it modular. You can be up and running in under an hour, even with a team of one.

We recommend starting with competitive intelligence or voice-of-customer tools, as they require little effort to get going and build the foundation for your workspace. But you can also begin with roadmapping, idea management, or go-to-market planning.

Regardless of your starting point, you can gradually expand functionality over time to build out the end-to-end lifecycle. Deliver quick wins by pushing information to teams via our communication tools and integrations before bringing them fully onboard.

“Ignition has quickly become the centerpiece for driving alignment between product and product marketing" - Christine Ladd, Director of Product Marketing, MRI Software

A Bright Future Ahead

We're deeply grateful to all our customers, users, investors, and teammates who have helped us reach this milestone. Thank you for believing in us and joining us on this journey. The future of Ignition is incredibly bright and we can't wait to show you what we have in store.

‍

With Ignition 2.0, product teams finally have a unified, automated, and intelligent platform for driving product success. One that helps you build what sells and align everyone to sell what you've built. Here's to the next phase of our rocket ride together. Onward and upward! 🚀

‍

Derek