Productboard AI can automatically link feedback from your insights board to feature ideas in your product hierarchy, saving you time you'd otherwise spend manually processing feedback and ensuring every piece of feedback you collect is more easily taken into account for prioritization.
Note: Productboard AI is not available for purchase at this time. However, all capabilities of Productboard AI are or will be included in Productboard Spark. See Beta: Productboard Spark for details.
In this article:
- How to activate auto-linking
- Configuration options
- Tips for working with auto-linking enabled
- Known limitations of the beta solution
- See also
How to activate auto-linking
Prerequisites: You must be an admin and your workspace must have the Productboard AI add-on enabled before you can set up auto-linking.
- Open the workspace menu in the top left corner.
- Go to the Productboard AI page.
- Click Setup linking.
- Review the default configuration and adjust it if needed.
- Click Save & enable.
Verifying auto-links for more accurate results
The auto-linking verification flow gives you more control over auto-linked feedback. When feedback is linked to a feature in the product hierarchy, it can be one of three types:
Manual link – created by a maker manually
AI to verify – feedback was linked by AI and is pending maker review
AI verified – feedback was linked by AI and verified by a maker
Newly-created auto-links are considered unverified until you manually verify them. You can verify auto-links from the feedback sidebar. By reviewing auto-links you provide valuable feedback to our AI model and it helps us improve the quality of AI results in your workspace.
You can also verify links from the insights tab of an item in your product hierarchy. From here, it's possible to verify multiple auto-links at once by using the white checkboxes to select several links before verifying them.
You can also filter insights boards by these link types. This allows you to filter feedback that was linked by AI and is pending your manual review. You can use the Feature owner filter to filter only unverified feedback related to items that you own in the product hierarchy.
Example: In an insights board's filters, select yourself as the Feature owner and set the Link type to AI to verify, then save the board as "My insights to review" so it can serve as the place to go if you want to learn about feedback for your domain.
Configuration options
We know that every organization has different ways of working. You can configure auto-linking functionality to fit your workflow and needs. There are 2 main configurations:
- Feedback sources: You can select which feedback source types you'd like to include for insights auto-linking. You can decide to exclude certain feedback types if you decide that a manual review is always required. Please note that feedback coming from Salesforce is not supported.
- Feedback to include: During the initial setup, you can decide if you want to include only new feedback for insights auto-linking or include historical feedback as well.
- Importance: You can select the default importance that will be assigned to all insights that are linked by AI. This isn't permanent; you can always override an individual insight's importance. If you want to handle assigning importance manually, you should select Not known as the default value.
- Feedback processing: To maintain workspace hygiene, makers usually mark feedback as Processed once they analyze the customer feedback and link it to the product hierarchy. By default, feedback is not processed after it is auto-linked. This allows you to have more control and get comfortable with the auto-linking mechanism in the beginning. After that, you enable the auto-processing.
- Items included in auto-linking scope: You can select the parts of your product hierarchy you want auto-linking to be applied to. This setting gives you control over the scope of the functionality. We suggest excluding parts of your hierarchy that you don't need to create insights e.g. some subfeatures potentially or certain products that are use for internal processes.
Note: All AI generated insights can be reverted when disabling insights auto-linking.
Tips for working with auto-linking enabled
- Use your whole hierarchy for insights. Feedback can be auto-linked to all levels of your hierarchy (products, components, features, and subfeatures) based on your configuration in the settings. Higher-level items are good for storing problem-area insights, while lower-level items are better for solution-area insights. A single piece of feedback may be linked to multiple items (eg. two features in different parts of your product hierarchy).
- Make sure your features have names AND descriptions. Productboard AI analyzes the content of your unprocessed feedback and the details of your hierarchy items to find the best matches, so in order for the AI to detect a feature as eligible for auto-linking, it must have both a title and a description. The more specific language you use, the more accurate auto-linking becomes.
- Auto-linking will not create new features. Feedback that does not match any existing item in the hierarchy is simply not linked to anything. This represents a new signal from stakeholders and we recommend a human be in charge of deciding whether and where to create a new hierarchy item.
- Auto-linked insights have the "Linked by AI" label. When you open feedback details or a feature's insights tab, you can see which insights were created by AI. This helps you keep an eye on what's happening behind the scenes and potentially correct AI insights if needed.
- Let the AI do its job. Insights auto-linking is executed every three hours. If you have automatic triage rules in place, you might be assigned as the owner of new feedback and receive a notification before auto-linking has a chance to get to it. Resist the urge to analyze the feedback yourself right away (the robot gets sad if it can't work).
Watch your notifications. Every Monday we'll send you a personalized in-app notification with a number of unverified auto-links pending your review. You can use this notification as a starting point for your weekly review flow. Makers usually schedule dedicated focus time in their calendar to learn about customers.
- Use insights digests to stay on top of pertinent feedback. Productboard sends you a personalized insights digest on a weekly basis with updates on features you own to help you focus on what matters. If you aren't getting one, go to your workspace dropdown > My account to enable it.
Known limitations
- It may take up to 3 hours to complete the initial analysis of all your existing feedback after you save and enable insights auto-linking for the first time, but you'll be able to see individual auto-linked insights in your workspace as soon as they're processed.
- Feedback imported from the Salesforce integration, portal card votes, and feedback that is less than 100 characters long is excluded from insights auto-linking.
It's not possible to filter unverified AI links from a grid for the purpose of prioritizing based on verified links.