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Identify trends in collected feedback

Kamila Fournier
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Productboard Product Team
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Now that you've directed ideas, requests, and pieces of feedback into your Insights board from various sources, you have a single, centralized, searchable repository. Well done!

To reap the fruits of your hard work, you can review Insights trends to get a comprehensive and visual overview of the most important customers' issues. 

Trends is a summary layer that sits on top of the Insights board to visualize how your feedback changes over time. Insights Trends can help you prepare for strategic planning or in situations where needs change quickly, i.e., during a pandemic, in volatile industries, or after you run a campaign.

In this article:

Relevant to both new and legacy boards

Accessing Insights trends

As a maker or contributor, you can switch between viewing your notes or your Trends on the Insights board, allowing you to dive into the details or zoom out.

You can apply notes filters to the entire Insights board so that you can refer to all the individual Notes a trend consists of or check out the summary trend for a specific subset of notes. 
For more information, see Filter the Insights board to find relevant feedback.
To access Insights trends:

  • Click on the trends icon (trends.svg) on the Insights board.
  • To change the timeframe, use the date filter (date.svg). You can choose to display trends within the predefined values: All time, last 7 days, last 30 days, last 90 days, or last 12 months. Or you can set your custom range.

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Identifying trending feedback

Insights trends allow you to quickly identify and stay on top of the most relevant, recent, or trending themes in your collected feedback.

You can also see how these themes change over time and which segments are talking about them. There are five pre-configured modules available. You can learn more about each below:

Notes created

The Notes created module tells you how frequently notes are created in Productboard.

With Notes created, you can consider time dynamics as additional criteria when exploring opportunities.

By doing so, you can confirm your assumptions about growing or declining trends, feel more confident in your prioritization decisions and make a better business case to internal stakeholders about why you should dig deeper into a specific feature idea.

This module, combined with search and filters on the Insights board, enables you to check or validate hypotheses about how often specific needs are mentioned without checking individual notes.

Use this module to answer questions like:

  • How often are we hearing about this keyword/tag?

  • Are we hearing more/less about it, i.e., is it becoming more or less important?

  • Are requests for this (portal) feature growing?

  • Are our efforts to improve feedback collection for X segment/team working?

 

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Trending segments

The Trending segments module will surface the top and trending segments if you've created segments in your workspace. By analyzing this module, you can understand the distribution across segments for any area of interest.

It will also provide a different perspective and give an overview regarding what a specific segment is asking for. You can also use segment columns on the features board and prioritize the needs/opportunities for a particular segment.

You can also click on a segment name to learn more about the segment and its users or companies.

Use this module to answer questions like:

• Who's talking about X (topic)? Which segments are asking for this?

• How much do we hear from segment X? Is it balanced, or do we need to solicit more feedback? Is there a recent uptick?

• Which segments care most about X product area? (Hint: Try applying Hierarchy or Tag filter or leverage an existing Insights board).

 

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Trending features

If you link notes to relevant feature ideas, the Trending features module will show you which products, components, or (sub)features have the most links to notes created in a given timeframe.

This can help you validate assumptions and prioritization decisions during strategic planning or make a better business case for why you should build a feature.

Use this module to answer questions like:

 

• Which features are we tracking for this keyword/topic?

 

• Is there an uptick in requests for some features in my product area? (Hint: Try applying Hierarchy or Tag filter or leverage an existing Insights board).

 

• How are the top requests this quarter different from last quarter? Has anything become more/less important?

 

You can use this module in different ways:

  • You can click on a (sub)feature/component/product name directly in the module to open it in the sidebar. Here, you can review what the feature is about, which objectives it supports, whether it's already on the roadmap, and much more.
  • When you switch over to the Insights tab, you can review all the underlying insights to dig further into the feedback.
  • You can also follow the feature to monitor its progress or mark it as a candidate for your future roadmap.
  • If you want to see a broader set of information about individual features, you can also use the user impact score to surface your top-requested features on the Features board.

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Whether you are a product leader or individual contributor or work for an enterprise or a start-up, you may need to look at more or less granular feedback depending on the situation.

You can toggle hierarchy entities (product, components, features, sub-features) on/off to see only those you care about in an uncluttered view by clicking on the Settings icon (Settings-1.svg).

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Trending tags

Note tags are typically used to group notes by high-level solution areas or themes (such as integrations, usability, etc.).

The Trending tags module shows which tags were most commonly applied to notes created in a given timeframe.

The information you can gather from this module depends on how you're using tags in your workspace.

Use this module to answer questions like:

  • What are the solution areas most commonly mentioned in our churn feedback?

  • Are there any areas we recently heard more about that we need to analyze more in-depth?

  • Is there a recent uptick in usability issues for my product area?

 

 

Here are a few tips to bring more value to this module:

• You can assign tags in bulk to all notes that fit certain criteria. For example, you could use a filter to surface all notes that contain specific keywords.

• Do a little clean-up exercise, merge duplicate tags, and remove those you no longer use. Learn more about managing tags in this article: how to manage tags. 

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Trending topics

Productboard's smart topic detection leverages machine learning to provide you with a better understanding of common patterns in your collected feedback.

Trending topics give you a unique opportunity to explore emerging and trending smart topics in the feedback you care about. You can quickly learn what topics are the most common in a certain segment, company, or product.

Use this module to answer questions like:

  • Are there any topics we recently heard more about that we need to analyze more in-depth?
  • How often are we hearing about a certain topic?
  • Are there differences in what we commonly hear from customers across segments?

 

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Finding trends that are most relevant for you

Whether you are a Head of Product for a large company or a Product Manager responsible for part of your company's portfolio, different notes subsets will be more or less relevant. To find trends that matter to you, utilize note filters, Insights boards, and the search bar.

This way, you can easily zoom in on feedback for a specific timeframe, your product area, a strategically important segment, or a specific source. This flexibility allows you to look at trends in all collected feedback or a particular topic.

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Mapping unprocessed feedback with Insights trends

Insights Trends can help you shorten the time to identify opportunities if you have loads of notes but little time to process them. Unlike the features board which relies on manual linking of notes to features, Insights Trends allows you to use standard search to quickly check hypotheses about a specific subject across all of your collected feedback without reading and processing notes one by one.

Use case: Imagine a scenario where leadership is considering an addition to the product offering. The product team hasn't focused on collecting feedback for this specific offering to date, but you remember reading about something similar in your notes.

To back up your assumptions, you can search for specific keywords and see if the search surfaces any existing Trends.

For example, if you were thinking of adding mobile apps to their product, they could search for keywords like mobile, ios, android, app, and so on.

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Personalized Insights Digest to stay on top of customer 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.

In the weekly email digest, you can see the following:

  • Total number of insights linked to your features in the last completed week.

  • Review of top features you own and the total of their new insights.

  • Total of unprocessed notes assigned to you by the end of the last completed week.

In the email, you can click on each area, and that'll take you to your workspace to dig deeper into the trends.

Customers with AI add-ons can see additional statistics of auto-linked insights. More details here.


Disabling the weekly email digest

To disable the weekly email digest, follow these steps:

  • Click on the Workspace name on the top left.
  • Then click on User-1.svg My account.
  • On the profile page, scroll down and toggle off: Insights digest.

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FAQ

How are trends calculated?

Trends calculate the percentage change, which quantifies the change from one timeframe to another and expresses the change as an increase or decrease, i.e. (𝑉2−𝑉1)/|𝑉1|×100.

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For example, if I had 25 notes created Aug 1-Aug 31, these would be compared to 43 notes created Jul 1-Jul 31, resulting in decreasing Trend of -42%.

If there are no Notes created in the previous timeframe or if you have Any time selected in the date created filter you will see the label NEW.svg.

How many items are listed in trends table modules?
Up to 200 items are listed in the Trends table module. The resulting set may be smaller subject to the number of items in your workspace, your filter selection, or in the case of Trending features configuration and product permissions.

See also

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