Topics: Identify patterns in your collected feedback

Jake Sawyer

Updated February 20, 2025 14:22

Productboard's feedback topic detection provides you with a better understanding of common patterns in your collected feedback. This feature helps you categorize feedback for more efficient note exploration so you don’t have to read the notes one by one in order to extract valuable insights.

There are two types of topics:

Manual topics: These keyword-based topics can be manually created to track mentions of specific functionalities, competitors, or problems. Every time a keyword is included in a feedback note, it's automatically assigned to the respective topic.
* AI topics: Our AI models create topics automatically when they detect emerging patterns in your collected feedback. You need at least 250 notes in your workspace for AI topic detection to work.

* Note: AI topics are only available with either the Productboard Pulse or Productboard AI add-ons.

Manual topics

Topics are based on one or more keywords (or phrases). A keyword can be anything, but they're often most useful when related to specific functionalities, competitors, or problems that you want to keep track of.

Each note has a Topic field which will populate based on the keywords found in its feedback:

Creating new topics

Any maker in your workspace can create a topic like so:

From the Main menu, under Data, click Topics. This page lists every topic in your workspace along with the number of notes assigned to each topic.
Click Create > Topic in the top right corner. A new topic sidebar will appear.
Put the name of your topic at the top of the sidebar. (For example, the name of a competitor or an existing feature you want to track).
In the sidebar's Definition section, add the keywords that this topic should track, separating each word or phrase with commas. Keywords are governed by OR logic, meaning a note only needs to contain one of the listed keywords in order to be assigned to that topic. The more keywords you add, the more notes will potentially match the topic.
When you're done adding keywords, click Save beside the Definition section header. Productboard will immediately start scanning for your topic's keywords across all existing notes. Within five minutes, your new topic will appear in the Topics field of all relevant notes. (Each note can have multiple topics assigned.)

Editing existing manual topics

You can change the name and keywords of a topic any time by returning to Data > Topics and opening the topic's sidebar.

Changing a topic's name doesn't impact how notes are categorized, but changing its keywords will. You may have to wait a few minutes after changing keywords for the topic assignment to update.

Deleting manual topics

If there is a topic that you don’t want to see in your workspace, you can delete it by opening the ••• More actions menu in the top right corner of the topic sidebar. You can also access this menu by hovering over a topic on the Topics page itself.

Note: If you have access to AI topics, and you delete a manual topic, Productboard will not regenerate it as an AI topic.

Merging manual topics

It's not currently possible to click a button and merge two manual topics. For now, you must merge them yourself by adding one topic's keywords to another, then deleting the redundant one.

Using topic filters for efficient note exploration

In the filter dropdown on any insights board, you can see a list of all the topics in your workspace, sorted by the total number of notes containing that topic. Once you select one or more topics to filter, they’re moved to the top of the filter list. You can combine topic filters with other filters to create insights boards that you can easily share or return to later.

AI topics

Productboard can analyze your notes and generate topics based on natural-language interpretations of the customer’s intent. These AI-generated topics are based on the latest LLM technology via OpenAI. You can find these topics tagged and displayed on each feedback note. Note that there can be multiple topics per note, depending on the note content.

Minimum number of notes needed for AI topic generation

Your workspace must contain at least 250 notes for AI topic generation to work. To collect more feedback into your Productboard workspace, you can:

AI topic generation cadence

Productboard automatically scans note data and generates new AI topics every two weeks or when 250 new notes are created or imported to your workspace. New topics have a “New” badge next to them so you can easily recognize them.

Deleting & merging AI topics

You can use the ••• More actions menu in either the topic sidebar or on the Topics page to delete an AI-generated topic or merge two AI-generated topics together.

When you delete a topic, Productboard will try not to generate that same topic again in the future.

Topic summaries

Productboard automatically generates a summary for each detected topic to provide a high-level overview of all associated feedback notes. Summaries can help you with the initial setup, add topics to topic groups, or create automation rules. These summaries are automatically updated whenever a substantial number of new notes are assigned to the topic. The latest refresh is timestamped at the top of the summary.

Topic groups

You can create topic groups to categorize topics related to the same product, UX gaps, integrations, competitors, and so on, making analysis-at-scale easier when used in combination with the enhanced topics module included with Productboard Pulse.

If you're a maker, you can create a topic group like this:

On the topic management page, click + Create in the top right corner.
Select Topic group from the dropdown.
Give the topic group a name.
Click the plus button beside Topics to add topics to the group.
When you're done, click X Close detail.

Note: You must create topic groups and assign topics to them manually. This process is not yet automated.

Emerging and trending topic exploration

On the Analytics page of any insights board, the trending topics module helps you quickly learn which topics are the most common for any subset of feedback, such as feedback related to a certain segment, company, or product.

To review trending topics:

On any insights board, set your filters to display the desired subset of notes.
Click Layout in the top left corner of the board and select Analytics.
See results in the trending topics module.

Topics are sorted by the number of related notes within the filtered subset. Trends are rendered as percentage increases or decreases from one timeframe to another like this:

(𝑉2−𝑉1)/|𝑉1|×100

For more information about insights trends, see the article Identify trends in collected feedback.

Bulk-linking topic notes to items

You can take notes assigned to a specific topic and link them to your product hierarchy all at once, saving you from having to hunt down those notes and create the insights one at a time. Here's how:

Open a topic sidebar by clicking directly on a topic wherever you see it (from a note, the Analyze page of an insights board, or the Topics page in the Data section).
On the Notes tab of the sidebar (open by default), scroll down to the Notes section. Here you'll see a list of every note that's been assigned to this topic, along with any insights that note has already created. (If you access the topics sidebar from an insights board with active filters, the notes displayed in this list will respect those filters.)
Select the notes you want to link to your product hierarchy. You can scroll through the list and select specific notes using the white checkboxes beside each one, or else click Select all at the top of the list. (If you have more than 30 notes, that message will say Select x more, and you'll have to scroll down to the end of the list to load the remaining notes before you can select them.)
Click Link to hierarchy and choose the item you wish to link your selected notes to.

Note: If you have AI summaries enabled and active, the notes which appear in the topic sidebar's list will be AI summaries instead of the whole note. You can click on the summary to read the whole note.

Defining insights automation rules with topics

You can use topics to define insights automation rules to auto-assign and auto-tag notes. This will help you automatically route the feedback to the right PMs and reduce the number of manual triaging steps.

If you're an admin, you can create topic-based insights automations like so:

Click your workspace name in the top left corner and select Insights automation from the dropdown.
Click on the New rule button.
In the IF statement, select Topic as a condition.
(Optional) Choose ANY/NONE logic.
Pick the topics you want to use.
When you're done, click the Create automation button to save and activate the rule.

See Use insights automation to create triage rules for more details.