Unsorted feedback

Requests arrive all week — a comment in a channel, a line in a meeting, a customer email forwarded twice. Each one might be a feature, might be an epic, might be nothing. Putting them on the roadmap to avoid losing them makes the roadmap wrong; leaving them in your inbox makes them disappear.

Unsorted feedback is the third option: a place inside your workspace that is explicitly not the roadmap.

What it does

Any status can be marked not on the roadmap yet. Items at that status stay in your workspace and stay searchable, but they stop behaving like roadmap items.

The one thing Check does say is how big the pile is and how old it has got. That note costs you no points — an unsorted inbox does not make a roadmap unsound, it makes you behind — and it disappears entirely when nothing is waiting.

What it looks like

An unsorted item is drawn as a roadmap item that has not been filled in yet, because that is what it is. No status stripe down the edge, a dashed outline, a plain grey surface, and none of the badges whose answers you do not have — level, type, priority, owner, target period. What is left is the text of the signal, how long it has been sitting there, and one chip:

The missing badges are the point. Feedback stays separate while you decide which opportunity it supports. Planning fields belong to the work you later choose.

When to use it

• Signals from the market that you have not made a decision about.
• Requests that arrive between planning cycles, when adding them to the roadmap would be a promise you have not made.
• Anything you want out of your head and out of your exports at the same time.

When not to use it

• As a backlog. This is not a place to keep work — it is a place to hold things on the way to a decision. If the count never comes back down to zero, it has become the thing it was built to prevent.
• For work you have already committed to. That is a roadmap item with a Planned status, not a signal.
• To hide a roadmap item you would rather not discuss. Use Parked, which is an honest statement that something is deliberately paused.

3-minute flow

Sorting the pile

You can now capture feedback directly in Items → Feedback inbox, without setting up a status first. Only its text is required. Source, requester and affected group are optional; the app records its capture date separately from later edits.

Link feedback groups the need with related requests while retaining the original record, source and wording. Linked feedback leaves the unsorted count and stays outside the roadmap and stakeholder exports. Find it in Items → Feedback inbox or on its opportunity. See Feedback to opportunities and delivery for optional MICE assessment, linked work and outcome review.

Sort, next to the Unsorted count or in Check, opens the same feedback review as the inbox. Opening an unsorted card on the canvas does too. There is one sorting flow, with four choices:

Reuse the work you already have

Existing work to check shows items sharing words with the request, and the words they share. Open a candidate to inspect it. If it already has an opportunity, Use its opportunity selects that problem for linking. Otherwise, create or choose an opportunity and link the existing item in its Work step.

This is word matching, not a clever guess. Something asking for the same thing in different words may not appear — "bulk edit target dates" and "change several items at once" mean the same and share nothing. An empty suggestion list does not establish that the request is new.

Work is where you choose what to build. Create or link a roadmap item there. New work starts unscheduled; choose its level, horizon and dates on the item when you know them. Add item remains available for work you already intend to plan directly.

What you sorted keeps its words. The original feedback, source and capture date stay available on the opportunity. Linked work shows Delivery context, and its handover brief quotes the retained feedback. Records promoted or merged in an earlier version keep their saved evidence; the new flow does not rewrite them.

Two people asking for the same improvement need not create two work items. Link both requests to the opportunity and reuse the same work. After release, check each original request separately: related does not always mean identical.

What we decided not to do

Declining keeps the request and your reason in Feedback inbox. Open a declined request to read the reason or press Reopen feedback, which puts the same record back in the pile without resetting its capture date. When the waiting pile is empty, Declined on the canvas opens the latest decision; the back arrow takes you to the rest of the inbox.

That list is the answer to the conversation everybody has eventually. Somebody asks for the same thing three months later, or asks why it never happened, and without a record the honest answer is "I think we talked about it". Every roadmap tool records what you chose; almost none records what you turned down.

The review also checks it for you: if a new signal shares wording with something you already declined, it says so — with the reason and the date — before you spend the decision again.

Open Declined feedback register in the inbox to export those decisions as a page to send someone (Pro). Keeping the record is free; the artefact you hand to another person is the paid part, the same line the handover brief sits on.

Best use cases

• A weekly sweep, where everything collected lands in one place and gets sorted in one sitting.
• Keeping a roadmap presentable while a noisy quarter is going on around it.
• Recording that a request arrived, even when the answer turns out to be no.

Common mistakes

• Letting the count climb. Past twenty it turns amber, and Check starts saying how long the oldest one has waited. Both are there to be acted on.
• Marking a status you already use. Every item at that status leaves the roadmap at once. Make a new status instead.
• Expecting exports to include it. They never will, on purpose. If a signal belongs in a stakeholder conversation, link or create the work through its opportunity and export the roadmap item.

Related guide pages

• Statuses, priority, and confidence
• Sort your unsorted feedback
• The handover brief
• Check — roadmap health
• Config

Availability

Free, on every plan. Saving the declined register as a page to send someone is Pro — the record itself is free.