Ignition 2022 In Review (and 2023 Preview)

One year ago, Ignition’s beta launched on our mission to help Product and Product Marketing leaders collaborate and be more successful in getting new products and features to market. 

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And whoo-boy has it been a ride since then! We’ve helped our users build and orchestrate thousands of GTM plans. We’ve supported SaaS launches, apparel launches, film and game launches; at companies ranging from 1 person startups to 5,000 person enterprises. We’ve also launched a bunch of our own stuff (using Ignition of course). 

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We shipped 48 releases in 2022, and if you’ve been using the product you know that our releases are usually BIG. Almost every week this year, we added significant features and significant UX improvements. 2023 has even bigger stuff in store, so let's look back at what happened, and what’s happening.

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What changed in 2022

For a complete recap of Ignition’s current state, check out our new demo video. But here’s the highlights from this year:

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Expanding to comprehensive GTM planning

Ignition’s original beta launch was understandably limited. It was basically just a doc, some simple task management, and a (fairly broken) Jira integration.

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Now, GTM plans in Ignition support fully-featured strategy documentation, asset management, and project management. Mission Control dashboards give you instant high-level snapshots into launch progress and performance. Automated competitive intel tools and customer research studies help you collect critical insights to inform plans, and post-launch OKR dashboards and retrospective surveys help track how launches are going.

Adding tools for Product teams to collaborate natively

Aligning Product and Product Marketing is done best when the build process and the GTM process live as close together as possible (ideally in the same tool). So at the request of tons of PM teams, in Q4 we added a ton of tools to empower Product to manage the build process directly in Ignition, and seamlessly handoff to PMM.

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Now, Product teams can use feature voting boards to let users nominate, vote on, and discuss new feature ideas. Roadmapping tools allow them to prioritize features, and share beautiful visual roadmaps. Changelogs let them communicate releases to teammates and users. And “Connections” make handoffs to PMM super simple as GTM plans inherit context like personas, insights, and product ideas when they’re created from roadmap items. 

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Fixing broken things, and improving ease of use

Adding as much as we did last year means we broke a lot of stuff. We’ll be the first to admit, for much of 2022 some features didn’t work at times, some UX was more overwhelming than intuitive or delightful, and load times were long. So we spent most of Q4 fixing, and drastically streamlining the experience!

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The good news is if you’ve logged in in January 2023, you’ve experienced an Ignition that’s fast, powerful, and intuitive. Copilot flows have been turned into a simple step-by-step flow to create GTM plans in seconds. Menu hierarchies have been cleaned up for incredibly simple navigation. Integrations, features, and notifications just work.

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What’s coming in 2023

The big theme for 2023 is automation. Now that all the “building blocks” are there for building and launching products in Ignition, we want to put as much of that on autopilot for you as possible, while continuing to expand our integration support.

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AI for research, AI for planning, and AI for sales enablement

Between our embedded AI writing and asset generation tools, you’ve already gotten a glimpse of how AI can help speed up GTM planning. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

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Insight summaries – In Q1 this year, we’ll automatically generate summaries of your Product Ideas, Win/Loss data, and insights, so you can get to actionable answers faster. 

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Plan, Persona, Battlecard generation – In Q1 this year, we’ll also be automating GTM strategy generation – giving you instant competitive strengths and weaknesses, persona jobs to be done, and positioning options.

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AI Sales Enablement – In Q2 this year, anyone in your workspace will be able to ask questions like “how do I talk about the Payroll product to a Finance person?” and Ignition will generate an answer that takes into account all your GTM strategies, personas, etc. and tells that person exactly what messaging points to focus on, and what assets to use.

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Measurement tools and expanded integrations

Within the next couple weeks, we’ll be rolling out GTM Impact Reports, allowing you to measure “lift” of key metrics pre-and-post-launch. We’ll also be investing heavily in expanding the number of locations you can integrate Ignition with – for measurement, connecting project management, and even importing plans.

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Sales enablement

Later in 2023, in addition to the AI “ask” functionality described above, we’ll be giving you the ability to better enable your sales teams with training modules, integrations to push planning data into CRMs, and even more communication automation for “pulsing” updates outwards.

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Thanks for being on the journey with us

We’ve seen hundreds of amazing products this year on Ignition, across so many amazing teams.

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Your feedback – whether it’s bug reports, feature requests, constructive criticism, questions, or raving to us about how much you love the product – all helps us build a better product for you. And when we build a better product for you, you can launch more products for your users.

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Ignition 1.0 is launching on Product Hunt on February 8th. We’ve got lots more work to do in 2023 though, and we’re excited to show you some of the magic we have in store. If you have thoughts on how we can improve Ignition, please reach out!

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From all of us at Ignition, thank you for being part of our launch team.

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