Example data. Fieldnote is a fictional company used to fill all 61 boards, so the examples tell one consistent story.
Post-PMF Fieldnote: after 8 activation interviews, Ana and Karim cluster 70 verbatims into themes.
What the team took away
Theme C, offline, had the most notes but Theme A, nobody told us, explained the most stalled companies. Both became opportunities on the tree.
How to run it
Preparation
Invite only the people who ran the interviews or read every transcript. Three to five. Others slow it down and guess.
Before the session, everyone extracts observations from their interviews: one fact or quote per sticky, tagged with the interviewee code. Aim for 100 to 300 stickies in total.
On the board: an empty wall. No pre-made categories, that is the anti-pattern.
Block two uninterrupted hours. Affinity mapping in 30-minute chunks loses the emerging structure.
Agenda
5 min
Rules One observation per sticky, cluster by meaning not by keyword, anyone can move any sticky, no naming groups before step 4.
15 min
Post everything Dump all stickies on the wall in random order. Read a few aloud so people get the tone of the material.
40 min
Cluster in silence Move stickies next to those that say the same thing. Silent. When two people disagree, duplicate the sticky. Let groups split and merge.
30 min
Name the groups Write a header for each group as a full sentence in the user's voice: 'I do not trust the numbers on the dashboard', not 'trust'. Sub-group if a cluster exceeds 15.
20 min
Rank and cross-check Count interviewees per theme, not stickies. A theme from one talkative person is not a theme. Order by breadth and intensity.
10 min
Write the insight sheet Top 5 to 8 themes, each with the count and two quotes. This sheet is the deliverable, not the wall.
Pitfalls
Do not create categories first and sort into them. You will find what you expected and nothing else.
Do not count stickies. Count people. One interviewee can generate 20 stickies about their pet peeve.
Do not name groups with a single word. Single words hide disagreement about what the group means.
Afterwards
The insight sheet feeds the How Might We session, the opportunity level of the OST, and updates the assumption map. Share it with the whole team within 48 hours, while the interviews are fresh.