Existing Customer Feedback & Problems
What the organization already knows, before anyone researches anything new
About this workflow
Admitting the evidence the organization already holds, so a discovery round starts from what is known rather than from nothing. The unit of analysis is the problem — not the ticket, not the requester, and not the feature that was asked for.
Its discipline is denominators and provenance. Every source is named, dated and counted in its own units, so a count of tickets is never added to a count of interview participants; frequency, severity and segment are held apart, so the loudest channel does not become the most severe problem; and every problem leaves as a conformant Problem Record the aggregator can admit unchanged. It does not rank, and it does not decide — it makes what is already held countable alongside everything discovery goes on to find.
The recognizable task
- Feedback has accumulated across support, sales, reviews and surveys faster than anyone has read it
- A discovery round is starting and nobody has looked at what is already held
- Another team, or an earlier round, has a problem list nobody has reconciled
- Stakeholders cite anecdotes nobody can check against the pattern
- Every admitted source named, dated and counted, with its own denominator stated
- Problems stated in the customer’s language, with feature requests translated back to the problem beneath
- Frequency, severity and segment held apart — volume is not severity, and loudness is not either
- Every problem emitted as a conformant Problem Record the aggregator can admit unchanged
- What was already known separated from what was inferred, and nothing carried forward that no source supports