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Cross user feedback against usage before it becomes work

The Feedback Digest in the software-factory.dev factory reads new feedback next to seven days of usage data, and files an issue only when the evidence backs it.

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Software Factory

Published: 29 May 2026 Updated: 2 min read

User feedback comes from whoever bothered to write in. That is a louder, smaller group than “your users,” and it skews what the team thinks people want.

The factory built in public at software-factory.dev has an automation called the Feedback Digest that corrects for that bias, and the move is, I think, worth walking through. You can read the Feedback Digest automation definition on GitHub (opens in a new tab).

An hourly run over two inputs

The trigger is a cron line, “0 * * * *”. It runs every hour, plus a manual run on demand.

Each run reads two things: new feedback rows from the product database, and seven days of usage events. Then it sorts the feedback:

  • Bugs in one pile.
  • Feature requests in another, grouped by theme, so five notes about PDF export collapse into one.
  • General noise in a third.

Feedback means something different depending on usage

So far that is ordinary triage. The interesting part is the next step: it crosses the feedback against the usage data.

  • A feature with complaints but very low usage is read as a discoverability problem, not a quality problem.
  • A feature with heavy usage and no feedback is read as fine.
  • A feature with both is prioritized.

Same complaint, three different meanings, depending on whether anyone is using the thing.

Only two kinds of issue get filed automatically

Here is the detail worth copying. The Digest does not file an issue for everything. It auto-files only two kinds:

  • A bug report with reproducible steps, page path and expected-versus-actual.
  • A feature request that shows up in two or more similar submissions.

Everything else is proposed for a human to decide.

And when there is no new feedback, it stops without a word. No empty digest is posted to the team’s chat. The absence of a message is information too.

A note is one person’s experience

The feedback step is an easy one to get wrong. The instinct is to treat every note as a fact and route it straight to the backlog. But a note is one person’s experience. Usage data is everyone’s behavior. The Digest trusts a signal when both agree, or when the same request repeats.

How does your team decide which piece of user feedback becomes real work, and what evidence has to back it first?

Further reading

Written by

Factory skills, part 2 of 18

  1. The Feature Planner writes its own backlog, behind a human gate The triage automation in the software-factory.dev factory also writes its own backlog when the line runs dry, and routes anything risky through a person first. 2 min read
  2. Fix the incident and the rule in the same commit The Incident Responder in the software-factory.dev factory updates the conventions document in the same commit as the fix, so the rule that would have prevented the bug is there before the next change. 2 min read

All 18 parts

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