The evidence changes the argument
Keep the original customer wording beside the interpretation so the team can see where the evidence agrees and where it does not.
30 August 2026·Helpful BoBevidencedeciding
A product meeting where nobody has read the source material is a meeting about personalities.
Someone says "customers keep asking for a dashboard". Everyone nods, because everyone has heard something like it. But under that sentence sit five different requests: an ops lead who wants a weekly export, a founder who wants one number for a board deck, two admins who want to see who on their team is active, and one person who genuinely wants charts.
Synthesised, those are three small changes and one thing worth rejecting. Unsynthesised, it is a quarter.
What we found changes when the quotes are in the room
The useful shift is not a better scoring formula. It is that the exact words are one click from the claim. When a verdict carries its evidence:
- Disagreement moves from taste to reading. Two people can look at the same eleven quotes and converge.
- Volume stops being an argument. Nine mentions of a symptom and one mention of a cause are not nine-to-one.
- The loudest account stops setting the roadmap by default, because its quotes sit next to everyone else's.
The uncomfortable part
Evidence usually shrinks the work. Most of what arrives as a feature request is a broken default, an unclear label, or a missing email. Teams that read their feedback closely ship less and change more.
That is the trade we are interested in: fewer things built, more problems actually gone.