Create your first insight

Now that you’ve made your product hierarchy and filled it with any feature ideas you’re already thinking about, it’s time to practice working with your first piece of feedback.

In Productboard, you can sift through a piece of feedback (a note) and find the most important takeaway (an insight). By linking that takeaway to a relevant feature idea, Productboard easily organizes feedback with common themes.

In this article:

• Creating a note
• Creating an insight from a note
• Viewing your first Customer Importance Score

Creating a note

To create a note manually:

1. On any insights board, click the + icon on the bottom left side to create a new note.
   
2. Give your note a title. Below the title, you have the opportunity to associate a note with a specific company and even a specific user at that company:
   
3. Finally, you can choose to add a tag or two.

The anatomy of a note

1. Note title - This is the title given to the note.
2. User and/or Company - This is the user or company that submitted the note.
3. Tags - Note tags serve as a flexible way of categorizing notes, allowing you to filter for them later.
4. Topics - (Available on the Enterprise plan) This feature helps you categorize feedback for more efficient note exploration so that you don’t have to read the notes one by one in order to extract valuable insights.
5. Sentiment - (Available on the Enterprise plan) This feature helps you easily share customer love with the team while focusing on negative feedback to make better product decisions.
6. AI summary This feature extracts the most important gems from deep within support conversations, emails, and messaging threads. Save time and make better-informed decisions while removing the burden of sifting through long conversations and threads.
7. Highlight/linking button - You can select a part of a note and turn it into an insight with this button.
8. Note owner - A note owner is responsible for creating insights from the note and processing it so it moves to the archive. All notes for which you’re an owner will appear in your assigned
   folder. If you need to send the note to someone else, you can change the owner
   anytime!
9. Followers - Add any colleague who needs to see a note or receive notifications on it.
10. Process button - Once you're finished reviewing and processing the note, you can click the Process button.

Creating an insight from a note

To manually create an insight from a note, highlight the section of the note containing the idea or feedback and click on the pen icon that appears.

You can use the popup window to find the relevant feature idea from your product hierarchy. We suggest you type a search term in the search bar at the top to save time. You can create a new idea if the feature idea doesn’t exist in your hierarchy. Finally, assign a degree of importance to this feedback.

Want to see the whole flow in action? Here's a GIF to tie it all together:

Once you’ve finished linking your feedback to your feature, it’s time to process your note to remove it from Assigned to me or Unprocessed into All notes. This is similar to archiving an email: you aren’t deleting anything, but you’re finished working with it.

Just click the Process button at the bottom right:

You did it! You’ve now created your first note and created your first Insight by linking a piece of feedback to a feature idea. Nice work!

Linking via AI summary

You can link the AI-generated summary of a note to an item instead of picking it out manually. Just hover over the AI summary field and click Link to hierarchy. The rest of the process is the same as outline above.

Viewing your first Customer Importance Score

One more thing! We’ll touch on this a bit more later on, but keep in mind that linking a piece of feedback to a feature idea and assigning importance to it automatically generates a Customer Importance Score. This score is a quick way to identify your most requested features. You can view this Customer Importance Score on your Features board.

In the example above, we assigned one point to that feature’s Customer Importance Score because we received one piece of feedback with an importance of one:

The Customer Importance Score is turned on in your account by default. However, if for some reason you don't see this column on your Features board, you can turn it on via the Default fields () menu by clicking the   Add columns button.

Over time, as you process more insights, you’ll generate more and more points for your Customer Importance Scores. All that feedback, consolidated in one place, rolled up into structured data? Nice! 🎉

Now that you understand how feedback, notes, and feature ideas all interact with one another, it’s time to begin bringing in existing feedback from other sources and redirecting future feedback so it arrives in your Insights board automatically.

Next Steps

✅ Create your first note. Highlight a relevant section and link it to a feature in your hierarchy. Assign a level of importance.

✅ Locate your feature in your Features hierarchy and hover over the Customer Importance Score to see how your feedback factored in.