Quick start guide: Feedback

Most notes will come from contributors using your integrations to send feedback to Productboard, but notes can also be created manually by clicking the blue plus button on any insights board. This gives the note creator maximum control over a note's data and formatting, though it doesn't always scale well into larger product teams and processes. You can also create or apply templates to a blank note to standardize layouts for manual feedback.

See Create your first insight and Create templates to save time and align your team for details.

Every note has data associated with it. There are four data fields in particular that you should make sure are complete, since they facilitate easier organization and analysis as you scale your Productboard implementation. Here they are in descending order of importance:

Customer (A): Split into the Company and User subfields. These help you understand who's asking for what, schedule research interviews, and send updates to the right customers when you make progress on things they've asked for. 

Note: You're meant to record the originator of the feedback, not the agent who reported it.
If I submit feedback on behalf of Shevek from the Abbenay Institute, the Customer field should read "Abbenay Institute - Shevek," not "Productboard - Jake."

Owner (B): Indicates the maker who's responsible for reading and processing the note - usually a PM. Contributors can set this during manual note creation, or you can have a PM go through unowned notes once a week and match them to the right owner. Use this field to help you spread out the work of processing notes as they come and to create filtered inboxes (we'll cover that in a bit).

Tags (C): Decide on a format early. Capitals or no? Spaces or underscores? Emojis for clarity? Aligning on this prevents people from inadvertently creating duplicate tags.

See How do tags work in Productboard? for details. 

Name (D): Make sure this is descriptive and concise. You can't edit names of notes from certain integrations, but where possible, a note's name should relate to its origin, like "Phonecall with Tessier-Ashpool" or "QBR at FICSIT" for better identification.

When you hover over a note's feedback or highlight some of its text, a small button (A) will appear. Clicking the button will summon a nested list of your product hierarchy. 

Selecting an entity will create an insight by linking your highlighted feedback to that entity. You can then choose to give the insight some extra weight based on how important it is to the customer, link this insight to another entity, or simply close the panel by clicking away from it. 

See Link user feedback to related feature ideas using insights for details.

Note: If your hierarchy is messy or empty, you won't be able to create insights. Insights are important because they bind feedback to feature ideas and generate User Impact Score, an invaluable prioritization tool. You can read more about UIS here. 

The default note status is Unprocessed. Once someone (preferably the note's owner) has reviewed a note and created insights from it, they should change its status by clicking the MARK PROCESSED button.

See Turn customer feedback into actionable insights for details.  

Near the top of every insights board is a pair of buttons labeled  Filtered by and  Any time. These are the data and time filters. Changing these filters and then saving the board allows you to specialize insights boards for triage and analysis.

You should create many boards to tackle specific parts of a workflow. If your tags, ownership, and other data are in good order, insights boards can be made into themed inboxes. Here are some examples:

• If you're the only maker processing feedback, filter a board by Status > Unprocessed to ignore any note that you've already mined for insights and marked as Processed.
• If multiple makers will be processing feedback, create a board for each maker and filter them by Owner > [Name]. Keep these boards grouped together in a teamspace called "Product" or similar. This helps everyone stay focused on feedback relevant to their work. 
• If your makers are cross-functional and don't each own a specific part of your product, consider creating boards filtered by sets of tags instead of by owner. That way your feedback will be bucketed according to your own self-defined parameters. We use tags related to areas of our product (like "insights board", "roadmap", and "integrations").

See Turn customer feedback into actionable insights for details. 

Depending on your Productboard plan level, you may have access to simple if/than rules called insights automations. Admins can manage them from Main menu > Workspace dropdown > Insights automations. 

These automations fill out certain note data for you based on other characteristics. For example, you might want any note with the "API" tag to be assigned to a specific owner. This helps keep your notes organized into boards, especially when you don't have time to verify the data of each note as it arrives. 

See Use insights automation to create triage rules for details. 

When you hover over a note, a checkbox will appear. Click that box to add that note to your selection. Shift-click to bulk-select notes. You can edit certain data fields for all selected notes simultaneously from the details panel, including Customer, Tags, Owner, and Status. Bulk select is particularly useful for managing freshly imported notes. 

See Link user feedback to related feature ideas using insights for details. 

You can archive or delete a note from its More actions  button.

A note can be have one of three statuses: Unprocessed, Processed, and Archived. Nothing special happens when a note is archived; it will still appear in your insights boards and it still contributes User Impact Score to linked entities.

The main reason you'd archive a note is so you can filter it out of certain boards using the Status filter, thereby keeping your board relatively free of distractions. Also, deleting a note is permanent and cannot be undone, so archiving it is usually the better option unless you're sure you'll never need the note again.

See How can I archive a note on the Insights board? for details.