As a product manager, you no doubt already know the benefits of using customer feedback in your product development process. Understanding your customer's needs in detail is one of the most essential elements of developing successful products. Working with customer feedback doesn't come without its challenges, though.

One of the biggest challenges of working with customer feedback is in making sense of the information you have, especially when it's qualitative data. Qualitative data is rich in information but notoriously difficult to work with. But it doesn't have to be.

You don't need sophisticated natural language processing tools to start making sense of your qualitative customer feedback data. In fact, you can start with. just some sticky notes, a wall and a pen (or a virtual equivalent). And we'll look at how to do that in this article, by using a simple technique – affinity mapping.

We'll explore what an affinity map is, how to use one to work with messy customer feedback data, and how to summarize and store your findings. So, let's get started by answering the first question: what is an affinity map?

What is an affinity map?

An affinity map is a set of notes, each on an individual sticky note, which are sorted into groups (clustered) with other notes that they have something in common (an affinity) with. Each of the clusters is labeled with the affinity that links the notes in the cluster.

You may well have done this before without knowing what it's called, and you'll have certainly seen a wall with an affinity map on it in one of the offices you've been into. Increasingly, people are using online tools to make and manage affinity maps because they make remote collaboration easier, and because some of them allow you to export your notes, once sorted, in a CSV or other easy-to-use format. Other common names for affinity maps are: affinity diagram or KJ diagram (Named after Kawakita Jiro).

When is affinity mapping useful?

As mentioned in the introduction, affinity mapping is useful when you want to discover themes in qualitative data. In the context of customer feedback, that's likely to mean working with interview transcripts, answers to free text fields in surveys, and commentary and observations from user testing.

An affinity map can be a sense-making tool you use by yourself, but it generally works best with a group of people. Working through it together as an exercise can be an effective way to develop a shared understanding of a situation, and if you involve people with different kinds of expertise, you will likely discover areas of insight that you might not have done on your own.

How to use an affinity map with customer feedback

Step 1: Set yourself up for success

The insight you achieve from the affinity mapping process will only be as good as the data you put into it. With that in mind, take these two steps to prepare your data.

1. When you collect your data, make sure to capture metadata that will allow you to filter it later. For example, metadata might include age, geography, industry, company size, time, product version number, date, or any other data you will use to sort and filter the customer feedback later.
2. If you're working with data you've already gathered and don't have the exact metadata you need to cut it properly, just do the best you can here to backfill the information and learn from your mistake (we've all done it before!) for next time.
3. Cut your data and include only what is relevant to your goals. For example, if you want to find out what challenges users that fit a particular customer profile face with your product, use only data from customers that fit that profile in the affinity map.
4. Prepare your workspace. If you're doing this with physical sticky notes, find a room with a large wall or board you can put them on. Try and find somewhere that you can leave the notes for as long as you need them to be there (having to remove and re-stick them after relocating is time-consuming and frustrating. Make sure you have the appropriate level of privacy if you're working with information you don't want others to see.
5. If you're working in a digital space, choose a suitable tool (Mural and Miro are the most popular right now) and set up a board that all your collaborators have access to. Take some time before you start working to familiarize yourself with the tool. They tend to be fairly intuitive, but knowing how to copy-paste and bulk import items can save you time getting set up.

Step 2: Make your notes

Read through your data and summarize any relevant information on a sticky note. Take care to focus on only writing about what is there and not trying to read into the data.

For example, imagine you are working on a product that summarizes the daily news for users and sends them an email round-up in the evening. You find there are several comments saying that customers prefer to read the news earlier in the day.

A bad note would say 'News summary with breakfast'. This includes your own hypothesis on 'why' customers want their news earlier in the day and jumps to the conclusion that they want the whole summary earlier. You might want to record that hypothesis somewhere else to test but for the purposes of your map, stick to what is actually said in the notes.

A better note would say 'Read news earlier in the day'. This just states what you've observed in the comments.

Make sure each note contains only one point, not more than a few words or a short sentence, and that it makes sense when read by itself. If you can, use the same color sticky notes (you might want to use different colors to categorize them down the line).

If you have several people working on the map, it's often best to all do this step individually. It'll help you avoid 'groupthink' and stay as unbiased as possible with your observations. You can remove duplicate notes later when you sort them on the board.

Step 3: Sort your notes

Now that you have notes with all of your key information on them, it's time to start making sense of them. Working as a group, stick the notes up on the board, rearranging them so that notes which are connected to each other are close together.

You will likely find that themes start to emerge naturally, and these will depend on the data you're using. Generally speaking with customer feedback, you'll find that the themes that emerge are related to customer problems or jobs to be done, and within those themes will be a mix of the various pains and gains your customers experience.

Use sticky notes in a different color to name each of the groups so you know what they refer to. If there are any notes which don't belong to a group, park them to the side of the board and find a home for them later as more groups emerge.

Depending on the range of data you have collected, you might need to group the themes you have into 'super themes' to see if there are any larger trends that emerge.

If there are notes which are duplicates, remove them, adjusting what's on them if you need to. If you have any notes which are written in a different format, rewrite them to make things consistent.

If you've followed this process, you should now be able to see the themes that have emerged in your customer feedback. You can discuss what this means with your team. Very often this kind of analysis forms an excellent jumping-off point for further research. For example, if a particular customer job has emerged as being very important, you could start thinking about how to add value by helping the customer with that job. Or, if you've categorized the feedback by features, you might spot a current area of your product that needs more work to meet the customer needs.

Step 4: Summarise, share, and store your findings

Your affinity map will have a deep meaning to those who've worked on it but usually contains far too much detail for it to be useful to other stakeholders. So, to capture and communicate your insight, you'll need to summarize your findings.

Depending on the information you've been working with, the of your findings might have a natural home. For example, jobs to be done might translate neatly to user stories for your backlog, hypotheses to be tested, or items to go on your roadmap.

Sharing your findings helps the rest of your company understand the customers in more detail, and helps get everyone aligned. Incorporate this as the 'why' when you explain new features. You could also add a 'voice of the customer' section to company comms to help others in the organization understand what your customers think is important.

It's also a good idea to summarize your findings when you store your affinity map. A couple of paragraphs of prose is usually enough. Make a note of where the data was from, who worked on it, when you did it and what your key takeaways from the exercise were. You'll thank yourself later when you want to refer back to this work or if you have someone else who wants to understand what you did.

Depending on how searchable you need the data to be, you could also type the individual notes and categories up into a spreadsheet (some online tools like Miro and Mural have an export function that makes this easy), or just take a photo if you think your summary already has enough detail.

In summary...

Working with qualitative data from customers can be a challenge because it's so varied and contains such a wide variety of information. Affinity mapping is an effective tool to quickly make sense of the broad themes that emerge in that feedback.

In this article we've looked at how to make an affinity map of your customer feedback data, and how the themes that emerge from that map can contribute to your ongoing product discovery and development process.

You can use affinity mapping in many other contexts, too. In fact, when you are not sure where to start when looking at qualitative data, it's often a good first step for organizing it into more manageable chunks that you can examine in more detail. It's like a Swiss Army Knife for analyzing qualitative data. So with affinity mapping in your toolkit, have a go yourself and contact us if you need any help along the way.

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