Route feedback to the right person efficiently

The value of centralized customer feedback is only as good as the actionable insights you can extract from it. With larger volumes of feedback, however, your team may find it challenging to route feedback to its relevant audience.

This article is part of the best practice series which outlines how you can help your entire organization develop a deep understanding of what users really need and, in turn, build products that matter.

Does your team feel like they need to wade through piles of irrelevant notes before getting to the notes they care about, making note processing a chore instead of a learning opportunity? Are multiple team members reading the same note without anyone acting on it? Does your team spend a ridiculous amount of time manually assigning notes to colleagues? Do colleagues from go-to-market teams get frustrated that their notes are ignored and it’s unclear which maker to follow up with? If the answer to any of these questions is YES!, then explore our tips to assign the right note owner with little effort. Whether you just started using Productboard and are looking to set up your workspace to handle hundreds or even thousands of notes, or you receive a large amount of feedback regularly already, these techniques will provide a huge productivity boost to your entire team.

In this article: 

• Step 1: Dissect your product into distinct product areas and align on who is the owner of each area
• Step 2: Create product area Insights board for each maker
• Step 3: Get notes assigned to their owners
  • Leverage automatic note owner assignment of Portal votes
  • Use bulk actions to assign (and tag) notes from your product area Insights boards
  • Assign the remaining notes from the Unassigned notes view

Step 1: Dissect your product into distinct product areas and align on who is the owner of each area

Spend quality time with your team to create a mapping table that clearly states which maker is responsible for incoming feedback for a given product area. You can reference tags, topics (enterprise only), or just a set of keywords.

Product areas mapping table

Tips: You can keep the mapping on your internal wiki and also leverage it as the basis for other processes like routing bugs to the right team or categorizing support conversations. This is how we do it at Productboard and having a shared language across the organization, does wonders for us!

Make sure you tell everyone in the organization about how you dissect your product! You will need to do initial enablement when you roll it out but don’t forget to tell your newbies as they onboard too. You can also do this as part of a wider enablement for contributors to effectively contribute insights.

Once you know who owns what, set up Insights Automation rules (available on Essentials+ plans) to assign and/or tag newly created notes. Insights Automation can do most of the heavy lifting for you and reduce a lot of tedious work for your teams, allowing everyone to focus on reading only the feedback that they can learn from.

Tip: Keep in mind that products evolve and companies grow, so your mapping table and Insights automation will unavoidably become outdated over time. Make sure you review it periodically and ideally have one person in charge of regular reviews so that things don’t become obsolete and your system falls apart due to lack of ownership.

Step 2: Create product area Insights boards for each maker

Create Insights boards based on your product areas mapping table, as described in the step above. And yes, we recommend this even if you have Insights Automation set up!

Tips: Combine status (unprocessed) and owner (unassigned) filters with either tags, topics, or keywords to define owned product areas. 

You might even want to have multiple Insights boards for a single product area to have better coverage.

You can also include the maker’s or team’s name in the Insights board title and encourage makers to put their Insights boards in their Favorites.

Step 3: Get notes assigned to their owners

It’s important to assign notes an owner because it makes clear who is responsible for processing a note. It also helps contributors know who to follow up with if they need an update on an input they submitted in the past. In fact, they can leave a comment right on the note and the owner will automatically be notified.

There are several tactics to get notes assigned to their owners efficiently. While a well-set-up Insights Automation can do most of the heavy lifting for you, you may still need to supplement it with your own categorization here and there. Or perhaps your team doesn’t have access to Insights Automation. For any of these cases, we’ll provide some more tips below.

Leverage automatic note owner assignment of Portal votes

Portal allows makers to share ideas that are under consideration, planned, or have already been launched. When product managers post feature ideas on the Portal, incoming votes will automatically get assigned to the maker who owns the underlying feature. Moreover, they will already come in highlighted and linked to the associated feature, which means minimal effort during processing.

Use bulk actions to assign (and tag) notes from your product area Insights boards

Go to makers’ product area Insights boards as set up during step 2 and assign, and possibly tag notes in bulk. Doing this should only take a few moments.

You can select a range of notes by holding shift or selecting the checkboxes beside their name. Once you're done, just deselect all the updated notes.

Tip: Make this a weekly exercise (or perhaps monthly if you’re complementing Insights Automation). 

Assign the remaining notes from the Unassigned notes view

With the above tactics, your Unassigned Insights board should only be left with a small percentage of your overall notes intake.

Still, some notes will remain because they didn’t match your Insights automation rules or Insights boards filters nor came in as Portal votes. For the rest, you should assign the notes in the Unassigned notes view manually.

Tip: If you start seeing a pattern among the leftover notes, consider updating the filters set up of your Insights boards filters and Insights Automation rules.

By following the above tips, you can get your notes distributed to the right makers quickly, avoiding frustration and inefficiencies. Also, even if you don’t process certain notes right away, your colleagues from go-to-market teams can follow up with the right person and ask the right maker for an update on behalf of their customers.

Continue reading our best practice series about a deep understanding of what users really need.

Next up: Turn customer feedback into insights, faster and at scale!

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