Main idea

A base of customer feedback — interview verbatims, support tickets, visit reports — is usually filed along a single logic: by feature, by theme, by stake, by account type. The chosen axis works well for part of the feedback, and goes wobbly for all the rest.

Filed by feature, feedback becomes pieces of product: "the filter resets" finds its place immediately, but "absorb growth without hiring" has none, and the business objective that carried the request disappears at the moment of filing. Filed by stake, the symmetry plays in reverse: the altitude is kept, and the precise irritation on a screen is no longer findable when a designer needs it.

The defect is therefore not a bad choice of axis, it is the singleness of the axis. A single filing plane forces you to sacrifice either the business motive or the point of action — and that sacrifice is invisible, because badly filed feedback is still filed.

Layer added by "Information systems aren't going away. Their shape is changing." (2026-07-08). What the single axis imposes can be put another way: it forces you to pick a shape too early. One piece of customer feedback can be a proof, an objection, a screen friction, a decision to revisit, an example for a salesperson, a vocabulary point to clarify — and these existences are not in competition. The classification keeps one and makes the others disappear at the moment it is least informed, which is to say on the way in.

Why it matters

This shifts the diagnosis. When an insights system stops being used, the reflex is to blame the quality of the entries or the tool: people file badly, the tool is poorly built. The cause is often upstream, in a model that cannot contain the heterogeneity of its material.

It also says what not to do to fix it: adding categories on the same axis corrects nothing, since it is the single dimension that jams, not its granularity.

Nuances and limits

As long as the feedback is homogeneous — a support team that collects only interface anomalies — a single axis is enough and costs less than a multi-level framework. The problem appears when collection widens, not with volume.

The reverse case exists too: a single axis held by one person who knows the material stays usable for a long time. It is sharing across several roles — product, design, support, sales — that makes the defect visible.

Open questions

• By what observable signal does a team notice that its filing axis has started losing feedback?