Define and analyze themes with Productboard Pulse

Jake Sawyer

Updated July 10, 2025 17:35

It's one thing to build an effective feedback collection machine, but at a certain point you'll be collecting so much data that it'll become hard to parse effectively. Productboard Pulse provides tools to help you digest what everyone's saying about your products without having to read every word yourself.

Themes help you intelligently categorize feedback at scale using natural-language prompts.
Enhanced feedback analytics surface valuable data that would otherwise be too time-consuming to gather.

Themes

Note: Only admins and makers can create and manage themes.

A theme is a user-defined category that groups feedback notes together based on Productboard AI's natural-language interpretation of a given description.

Themes are designed for:

Product Leaders to track strategic initiatives.
Product Managers to discover and validate product opportunities.
CX Leaders to segment feedback and identify trends across journeys.

Creating a theme

To create a theme:

From the Main menu, click Insights > Themes.
Click Create > Manual if you want to configure the theme from scratch, or click Create > Template to choose from a variety of pre-generated themes which you can tailor as needed. Either way, the new theme's sidebar will open.
Give the theme a name.
Write a description, or click Suggest to have Productboard AI write one for you based on the name of the theme.
(Optional) Adjust the theme's filters, or click Suggest to have Productboard AI add some keyword filters for you based on the theme's name.

Note: Every theme has one default filter that limits the result to notes less than a year old. You can edit this filter to span a smaller or larger period of time.
(Optional) Assign a parent theme under which to nest this theme. The scope of a nested theme is limited to notes that match its parent theme.
When you're done, click Save.

Editing a theme

To edit or delete a theme:

From the Main menu > Insights > Themes, click on a theme to open its details sidebar.
Make changes to the theme's title, description, filters, or parent field.
When you're happy with the changes, click Save. The theme will regenerate its collection of notes based on your edits, which may take a few minutes (Changing only a theme's name will not cause it to regenerate.)

Note: When a theme is regenerated after an edit, it will overwrite any manual addition or removal of notes from that theme. We recommend waiting to do manual note curation until after you're happy with the base definition.

Deleting a theme

Note: Deleting a theme will not delete the notes attached to the theme. Your feedback is safe!

To delete a theme:

From the Main menu > Insights > Themes, click on a theme to open its details sidebar.
Click ••• More actions at the top of the sidebar, then click Delete.
Confirm that you want to delete the theme.

Theme notes

All the notes that belong to a theme are collected in the Notes tab of a theme's sidebar.

From the Notes tab, you can:

Read an AI-generated summary of the theme's notes.
Click on a note to open its sidebar, just as if you'd done so from an insights board.
Click on the user or company of a note to view that data in a sidebar.
Hover over a note and click Link to hierarchy to see a list of all the items the note is linked to. You can click an item in the list to open its sidebar.)
Hover over a note and click Copy link to easily share the note with another workspace member.
Hover over a note and click Remove note to remove it from the theme, in case the AI has included a note in error.
Hover over a note and click the checkbox beside its name to add it to your bulk selection. You can use the buttons that appear along the bottom of the sidebar to Deselect all or Select all loaded notes, remove all selected notes from the theme, or link all selected notes to a product hierarchy item.

Manually adding notes to themes

It's also possible to add a note to a theme manually like so:

Open a note's sidebar by clicking on it anywhere it appears (the Notes layout of any insights board is easiest).
Click + Theme.
Choose a theme from the dropdown menu.

Topics

A topic is an AI-generated theme. Topics help you discover feedback patterns that you might not have been looking for. You can convert a topic to a theme at any time, which gives you more control over its details and related notes.

Note: You must have at least 250 notes in your workspace before Productboard AI can begin generating topics.

From the Main menu > Insights > Topics, you can:

Browse a list of all topics.
Click on a topic's name to open its sidebar. which contains:
- The Details tab, where you can see information about the topic.
- The Notes tab, where you can review the topic's notes and interact with them much as you would on the Notes tab of a theme (see above).
- Click Create theme to begin converting a topic into a theme. A theme created this way will include the base topic as a filter. Description is optional.

You can also access topics related to a theme from the Topics tab of that theme's sidebar. From here, you can:

Read an AI-generated summary of each theme.
Click Related notes to view a list of all the notes connected to a topic, and interact with those notes much as you would on the Notes tab (see above).
Hover over a topic and click Create theme to turn that topic into a full theme. A theme created this way will include the base topic as a filter. Description is optional.

Best practices

Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of themes:

Start simple. Create 3-5 themes tied to business initiatives or segments.
Use AI thoughtfully. Only promote a topic to a theme if it provides strategic value.
Write good descriptions. Utilize best practices in prompt engineering.
Use all the tools. Tune your theme with filters in addition to AI descriptions for maximum control of the theme.
Be patient. It may take a couple minutes to collect notes when you create a new theme. Good time to stretch!
Be really patient for topics. Remember, your workspace needs at least 250 notes before it can even start generating topics, and initial generation can take a few hours.

Enhanced feedback analytics

Productboard Pulse includes enhanced visualization tools for analyzing feedback in your workspace. You can access these tools in two ways:

From the Main menu > Insights > Analytics.
By opening any insights board, clicking Board controls in the top right corner, and switching the layout to Analytics.

The Analytics layout is split into two main parts:

At the top, you'll see a graphical representation of your chosen data. You can adjust filters here, including a date filter, which applies to all data on the page.
Below that, you'll see a table of entities. You can toggle the checkbox beside an entity to add or remove it from the chart above. The second column in the table shows a configurable metric, while the third column always shows the trend over time (subject to any active date filters). You can click on an entity to open its sidebar, and use the search bar at the top of the list to find specific entities.

Configuration

To change the configuration of the board, click Board controls in the top right corner.

Within Board controls, you can adjust the following:

Layout: Change the layout of this insights board to the classic Notes layout (with notes down the middle and note details on the side) if you want to review notes individually or perform bulk actions on them.
Visualization: Change the structure of the chart at the top of the page. Trend is a line graph, while Rank is a bar chart.
Grouping: Change the entity type listed at the bottom of the page, choosing from Themes, Topics, Segments, Tags, and Features.
Metric: Change the metric by which you measure the entity type selected under Grouping. You can choose from Note count, Opportunity value (a Salesforce-integration-specific field), or any custom company number field (which can be configured manually or imported from Salesforce.)
Filters: You can add or edit filters from here instead of doing so from the top of the chart; they're the same filters.