Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
Information coming from a customer or a market that indicates a need, a friction, a constraint or an opportunity, without in itself constituting a decision or work to be undertaken.
Full definition
In ordinary commercial usage, "signal" designates an indication of purchase intent or dissatisfaction, spotted so it can be acted on quickly.
In the articles on this blog, the word names the status a customer request keeps as long as it hasn't been arbitrated: it is kept, connected to others, comes back out or never does. The signal is reliable on describing the situation lived and unreliable on the solution proposed; it is the situation that must be retained from it. It lives in a base of signals, distinct from the collective space of action.
Usage in the field
Customer interview minutes, support reports, sales meeting notes, discovery, arbitration between what stays under study and what becomes work.
Synonyms and variants
Customer feedback · verbatim · field report · expressed pain point.
Not to be confused with
- Backlog — the collective space of subjects ready to be worked on, which a signal doesn't feed automatically.
- Pain — what the user experiences; the signal is the trace of it that reaches the team.
- Request — the formulation of a solution the customer expects, which is one of the forms a signal takes.
- Need — what the customer is trying to obtain, reconstructed by the team from several signals.
Examples
A sentence heard in a sales meeting, kept without being turned into a card.
Three different feature requests traced back to the same business action: the grouping appears only at the level of signals.
Ambiguities / debates
Ordinary usage conflates the signal and the request, which lets the solution proposed by the customer enter the framework in place of their situation.
A second wobble: does a repeated signal stay a signal, or does accumulation count as sufficient proof to commit work?