Signals
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Availability
- Available to all users as a Beta feature. When this moves out of Beta, Signals will only be available for certain plans.
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Roles and Permissions
- Admin and editors: Can refresh, delete Signals, remove Insights from Signals, Archive Signals
- Reviewers: View only
Signals is ProdPad's AI tool that helps you analyze feedback. Signals is an updated and improved version of a previous Beta feature, Themes.
Although Signals is based on previous functionality, we're still keen to get your thoughts on this new version, so Signals is currently available to all users as a Beta feature. The next iteration of Signals may change according to customer feedback. When Signals moves out of Beta, it will only be available for certain ProdPad plans. To keep up to date on Signals, get in touch at help@prodpad.com, and to share your thoughts on the new feature, fill in our survey.
This guide covers
Understanding Signals
Signals uses natural language processing and unsupervised learning models to scan all your feedback and identify significant sentences within the piece of feedback. These significant sentences are flagged as insights.
The tool then groups together related insights across different pieces of feedback to create a Signal. Signals are surfaced as a dot cloud - the bigger and darker blue the dot is, the more insights in a Signal.
The aim of Signals is to make it easier and quicker for you to pick out emerging trends in your feedback. By surfacing emerging Signals, you can at a glance see which areas and features come up most frequently, and direct your discovery and research accordingly. You can also hone in on emerging Signals when looking at your feedback in the list view, through filters.
By archiving Signals, you can press pause on trends that aren't a priority at the moment and return to them later. Archiving Signals gives you a tighter focus on emerging themes, and keeps the number of Signals you're evaluating to a manageable number.
- You can refresh emerging Signals every 24 hours.
- Signals is currently only able to analyse feedback written in English.
- In this latest version Signals relies on your device's storage to keep track of changes. So when you make a change - such as archiving a Signal - it's just between you and your device. Your ProdPad account and fellow users won't be affected.,
- Signals by default analyses Feedback found in your Inbox or Reviewed states. Once you start to view and analyse your Signals, you can filter by state
- The more feedback you have in your ProdPad account, the more accurate and useful Signals will be. Here's how you can quickly import and populate your account with data from external sources, including CSV import.
Signals essentials
Getting started with Signals
Signals is located in the Feedback area of ProdPad. Navigate to the Signals tab at the top of the page, next to Companies.
When you use Signals for the first time, you'll have the option to:
- Surface Signals - start the scan of the feedback in your account, and create the dot cloud of Signals
- Import feedback - upload a CSV file to populate the feedback section, and give Signals your most recent data to work with
- Explore Signals in the sandbox - if you want to get a feel for Signals, you can explore how it works in our test sandbox environment
When you're ready to start using Signals, click Surface Signals now. If you don't have enough feedback in your account, a red banner message will prompt you to add more.
Navigating Signals
Once you have surfaced Signals for the first time - and whenever you return to the Signals tab - you'll see the following information:
- Filters - these filters apply to the feedback that has been analysed by Signals. This means that you can filter by the tags you already use for feedback, and by the product that a piece of feedback has been linked to. You can also filter by feedback state, Inbox, Reviewed or Archive. See our guide for more info on using feedback states.
- Top [number] Signals - this indicates how many individual Signals have been aggregated from your feedback.
- Emerging / Archived states - this allows you to flip between current, emerging Signals, and ones that you have archived for later consideration.
- Select Signals to archive - use this to move Signals to the Archived tab.
- Refresh Signals - if you have already surfaced Signals in the past 24 hours, this button will be greyed out. You can only analyse and surface Signals every 24 hours. The date and time stamp above the button will tell you when it was last refreshed.
- Signals dot cloud - these blue dots are your Signals, indicating emerging themes and areas within your feedback.
To take a closer look at the insights that make up a Signal, click on the dot. 
Analysing a Signal
Once you've clicked on a Signal dot, you'll see all the insights, sentences and phrases within a piece of feedback, that make up a Signal.
From here you can rename the Signal and add a description to provide further context. You can also Archive the Signal if it's not an area of current focus. In each insight, the small coloured circles will tell you the contact and associated company (if applicable) that provided the feedback. Clicking Read full feedback will expand the insight, so you can take a look at it in the context of the piece of feedback it belongs to.
Clicking the X symbol in the corner of an insight will remove it from the Signal. 
Archiving Signals
If you want to remove a Signal from the main emerging Signals dot cloud, you can Archive it. Once archived, you will then have the option to delete the Signal completely.
The benefit of archiving Signals is that you can push pause on themes that don't currently align with your roadmap, are out of scope, or that you just don't want currently focus on, for any reason.
Once a Signal is archived, whenever you refresh and surface new Signals, if there are new insights that apply to the archived Signal, they will still be added. The benefit of this is that you can see if any new feedback relates to the archived Signal, giving you a better understanding of how important a theme or area is to your users. It might be that a Signal that had only a few pieces of insight 6 months ago, has gained significantly more, prompting you to look at it afresh.
From the Archived tab, you can choose to Unarchive a Signal, moving it back to the Emerging tab, or completely delete it.
Best practice and suggestions
Enhance your feedback triaging
Using Signals when reviewing feedback makes it easier to connect emerging themes to items in your idea backlog. By viewing feedback through the lens of Signals, you can link related user problems or needs (the pieces of feedback) to possible solutions (ideas in your backlog). Read our guides to linking and tracking feedback and working with customer feedback for more guidance on how get the more insight out of customer feedback.
When reviewing a piece of feedback, next to the tab showing any linked Idea, you will be able to see any related Signals.
By clicking on the Signals tab, you can then view all the other pieces of feedback related to a Signal
After clicking through to view the related feedback, you can then use the Bulk update button to action feedback
From the Bulk update screen you can connect feedback from a Signal to:
- An existing or new idea
- An existing or new contact
- Product/s
- Persona/s
- Tags
Cut big chunks of data down to size
Cut big chunks of data down to size If you have user feedback in an external tool, such as a CRM or survey site, you can use Signals to get top-level insights. By importing data into ProdPad and surfacing emerging Signals, you can quickly and easily get a sense of the main themes and needs of your users.
You can bring feedback into ProdPad via: