One of Productboard's strengths is its ability to tie feedback from a central repository to the ideas and work items you use to make decisions about what to build next. That ability hinges on the creation of insights, which connect those feedback items and work items together.
This article covers what insights are, how to create and process them, and why you should care about doing so.
In this article:
- How do insights work?
- Linking feedback to hierarchy items
- AI Insights and AI summaries with Spark
- Processing feedback
- Generating Customer Importance Scores
- See also
How do insights work?
Whenever you receive user feedback about your product from an email, a support ticket, a phone call, research notes, or any other source, it will land in Productboard ready to read. You can then create a link between the feedback and a relevant item in your product hierarchy, like a feature or initiative. We call that link an insight.
Creating an insight allows you to:
- Consolidate feedback about an idea in a single place.
- Identify which users requested a given feature idea.
- Build a Customer Importance Score (see below) to identify your highest-priority customer needs.
Note: Before you can start creating insights, you need to have feedback to work from. To gather customer feedback in Productboard, you can either use customer feedback and segmentation integrations, import feedback from a spreadsheet, or you can create feedback manually.
Linking feedback to hierarchy items
Here's how to create an insight from feedback:
- Navigate to any insights board in your workspace.
- Click on any feedback to open its sidebar.
- In the body of the feedback, highlight the most relevant text or images.
- Click the Link to button.
- Search for the relevant feature idea. Select a feature from your product hierarchy.
- Identify the importance of this feature to this particular user or company. Was this a nice-to-have (+1) or a dealbreaker (+3)? Select an importance score to finalize the insight.
If you want to create a new feature to link to instead of attaching this insight to an existing feature, you can do so from the hierarchy menu by clicking Add new feature in the location you want the new feature to go.
You can even link one piece of feedback to multiple feature ideas. To create another insight from the same piece of feedback, just click on the insight to view all currently-linked items, then select Link another feature.
Note: You can also remove existing links from an insight by clicking the little x beside an existing link. This doesn't affect the insight or the targeted item; it only removes the link between them.
AI Insights and AI summaries with Spark
Note: Your workspace must have Spark enabled to use these features. See Activate Spark in your workspace for details.
Productboard Spark helps you make better-informed decisions faster by removing the burden of sifting through long conversations and threads. Instead, Spark automatically provides summaries of feedback and pulls out key quotes for you to quickly turn into insights.
Some general information about these functions:
- AI summaries and AI Insights are generated when feedback arrives in Productboard. If you import lots of feedback in one go, it may take some time for Spark to work through it all.
- AI summaries and AI Insights are generated for all types of feedback, except feedback imported from Salesforce and very short feedback. For feedback created manually, the summary is generated 3-6 hours after the feedback is created to give you enough time to finish the content.
Note: "AI Insights" and "insights" are not the same thing, despite the very similar name. An "insight" is a link between some feedback and a work item (like a feature) that helps you tally up how much interest customers have in a given idea; an "AI Insight" is just an AI-detected suggestion for something that might make a good insight.
If you find this confusing, please let us know by submitting feedback on our portal.
Creating insights from AI summaries
If the whole feedback item is relevant and focused on a single topic, it might be easiest to simply link the AI summary to a work item rather than picking out specific snippets. To do so:
- Navigate to any insights board in your workspace.
- Click on any feedback.
- Hover over the AI summary attribute.
- Click on the linking icon which appears in the top right corner.
- Search for the relevant feature idea in the resulting menu. Select a feature from your product hierarchy, or create a new feature idea.
- Identify the importance of this feature to this particular user or company. Was this a nice-to-have (+1) or a dealbreaker (+3)? Select an importance score to finalize the insight.
Creating insights from AI Insights
When you open feedback, Productboard automatically highlights key customer quotes with distinct styling. The AI Insights section in the feedback item lists all extracted quotes so you can quickly create insights from the most salient bits.
To create an insight from a highlighted quote:
- Open any feedback on an insights board.
- In the AI Insights section of the feedback item, hover over any quote and click Link to item. (You can click directly on the quote itself to scroll down to its position in the feedback if you'd like more context.)
- In the resulting menu, search for and select the relevant feature idea, or create a new one.
- Set the importance level to finalize the insight.
Once you create an insight from an AI Insight, it transitions from AI-Insight styling to insight styling in the feedback item body.
Processing feedback
Once you've finished linking your feedback to any relevant feature ideas, you can mark it as Processed so you and your colleagues know it's been reviewed. This also makes it easier to categorize when using filters.
To process a feedback item, simply click Mark processed in the bottom-right corner of the item. You can click the same button again to un-process the item.
Processing feedback makes it clear when a feedback item has no more insights to share. If you want to ensure a specific colleague notices you've processed feedback, you can add a comment to the feedback and @-mention them.
Tip: It's generally a good idea to have the owner of a feedback item be the person who processes that item. See Owning entities in Productboard for details.
Processing feedback in bulk
You can select a range of feedback by holding shift or selecting the checkboxes beside the name. In the feedback sidebar, you can then use the following bulk operations:
- (Un)process
- Archive
- Delete
- (Un)assign owner
- Add followers
- Tag
- Update Users/Companies/Themes
Generating Customer Importance Scores
Linking a snippet of user feedback to a feature idea creates a Customer Importance Score.
The Customer Importance Score represents the sum total of insights linked to a feature, weighted by importance:
- +1 for unknown importance
- +1 for nice-to-have
- +2 for important
- + 3 for critical
Most user insights related to a feature are expressing a related need, so by default, any linked insights increase a feature's Customer Importance Score by +1.
See Use the Customer Importance Score to surface your top-requested features for more details.