Triage the feed

Triage is the maker's half of Convo: reading what people said, deciding what it means, and answering. It is meant to feel like clearing an inbox, not grooming a backlog — a week of feedback in a few minutes, mostly from the keyboard.

Where it lives

The maker view is the same URL as the public page: /{workspace}/{KEY}. Convo decides which one to render from who you are, so a workspace member opens it and gets the feed, while everyone else gets the public board. There is no second link and nothing to switch on.

The header carries the product name, a search box, and — on the feed — a status filter. Two buttons on the right open the public view in a new tab, exactly as your users see it, and product settings.

The Feed

The feed is everything said about this product, newest first. It is a feed, not a leaderboard: endorsement counts show on a row but never sort it, and nothing is ranked by popularity.

Each row is the same row your users see on the public board — title, status, item key, who said it, when, reply count — plus the maker-only parts: a status pill you can click, the endorsement count, the person's cross-product thread ("also on ROAD"), a linked-ticket chip, a Notified chip, and buttons mirroring every keyboard action. The note's body is not on the row; open the item to read it.

Search filters by title, body, item key, or author name, and a tag: token in the same box filters by tag. Filter by status is a checklist of the five statuses; the ones you pick appear as removable pills inside the search box, and backspace on an empty box drops the last one.

The other three views

The left sidebar nests four views under each product, each with a count:

• Feed — everything, with the count of items still new.
• People — everyone who has said something here.
• Roadmap — the maker's read of the public roadmap; the count is planned plus in progress.
• Changelog — what shipped, with the close-the-loop banner.

Those three are read-only: they have no per-row triage keys, and their search filters what is listed — People by name or tier, Roadmap and Changelog by title, body, id, or author. Press ? on any of them and Convo says so rather than listing keys that would do nothing there. Triage itself always happens on the feed or on an item's page.

The five statuses

Every item has exactly one status, from new to planned to in-progress to shipped to declined. Status is the single source of truth for everything public — there is no separate roadmap object and no changelog to curate.

• New — the inbox. Not on the public roadmap; visible on the public board.
• Planned — the Planned column of the public roadmap.
• In progress — the In progress column.
• Shipped — the Shipped column, and Convo writes the changelog entry at that moment. The first time an item flips to shipped you also get a prompt: N people asked for this. Notify them? Nothing happens without that click. Closing the loop has its own page, which covers what the notify step does and where email delivery currently stands.
• Declined — off the roadmap entirely, and it sinks to the bottom of the public board. Declining is honest rather than hidden: the item and its thread stay readable, so the person who asked can see the answer.

Because the loop keys off status alone, a maker who sets status by hand gets the whole thing. Nothing outside Convo has to agree first.

Triage from the keyboard

Every action below has a button too, but the keyboard is the point. The full key list is on its own page — this section is what each action does.

Move with j and k, or the arrow keys. The focused row is ringed.

Set status with S. A small sheet lists the five statuses with number keys 1 to 5, so S then 3 sets In progress without reading the menu. Clicking the status pill on a row opens the same sheet.

Reply with R, which drops you straight into the composer. A maker reply is public — it lands on the item's own thread, where the person who wrote the feedback and anyone reading the board sees it. That is deliberate: a reply is a turn in a conversation, not an internal note. The composer takes Markdown, and a bare Enter makes a newline; send with ⌘ + Enter / Ctrl + Enter or the Reply button.

Edit the title with E. Most titles start out derived from the note itself — someone typing a paragraph into the capture box does not stop to name it — so the title is usually the first thing worth rewriting. It leads the public board, the roadmap, the changelog and the feed, so a good one is doing a lot of work. Enter saves, Esc abandons, and a blank or unchanged title saves nothing.

Merge a duplicate with M, on the feed only. M marks the row you are on as the one that folds in; a banner appears, you move with j and k to the item you want to keep, and Enter merges. The survivor keeps everything: every person attached to either item (with the stronger of their two roles), their endorsements, the replies from both threads, and the folded item's own text, re-posted as a reply attributed to whoever wrote it, dated when they wrote it. The folded item is then deleted, so there is exactly one conversation left. Nothing anyone said is lost.

Possible duplicates with D. Convo ranks the items closest in meaning to the one you are on and lists them with a similarity score and a Merge in button, which folds that candidate into the item you are on. Convo surfaces candidates and never merges on its own — the judgement stays yours.

Edit the tags with G — free-form maker-only labels, covered in Tags below.

Open the person with P — the full record of everyone that person has said, across every product in the workspace.

Open the item with Enter or O. Opening is a navigation, not an accordion: the conversation has its own page and its own address, which you can paste into a ticket.

Esc backs out of whatever is open, and out of the item page back to the feed. ? shows the shortcut list for wherever you are.

On your phone

Makers answer on the go, so gestures are a first-class idiom, not a fallback. On a feed row:

• Swipe left to set status.
• Swipe right to reply.
• Tap to open the item's page.

Vertical scrolling stays native, a swipe that starts on a button or link is left alone, and every gesture has a visible button on the row, so triage is never gesture-only.

The item page

Opening an item gives the conversation room. It carries the full note, the status pill (click it, or press S), the author's name (click it, or press P), when it arrived, the endorsement count, and a Notified chip once its requesters have been told. Below that: the row of actions, then the thread — every reply, from people and from you, in order.

The same keys work here on this one item: S, R, E, G, T, D, P, and Esc to return to the feed. M is deliberately absent, because merging needs a second row to pick; D is the one-item way to fold a near-duplicate in. There is also a Copy link button, since the whole reason an item has a page is so its address can travel.

Tags

Tags are free-form labels on an item — how you slice the feed beyond status. They are maker-only and never appear on the public page.

Press G on a feed row, or on an item's page, to edit them. The editor is the tags you already have as chips, plus a field: Enter adds what you typed, a comma ends a tag (so pasting a list works), Backspace on an empty field takes the last one back, the × on a chip removes it, and ⌘ + Enter / Ctrl + Enter saves. An item carries up to 20 tags of 60 characters each. Saving replaces the whole set, and the change lands on the item's activity log like every other edit.

Tags then show as quiet chips on the feed row and on the item page. On the feed, clicking one filters to it: it types a tag: token into the search box, which you can type yourself too — tag:mobile, or tag:"dark mode" for a tag with a space in it. The rest of what you type stays free text, so tag:mobile crash means "tagged mobile, mentioning crash", and two tokens narrow together: an item has to carry both.

The tags are the same ones the REST API and the MCP tool surface read and write — tag_item replaces an item's whole set, listing items accepts a tag filter — so a tagging pass you ask an AI assistant for and one you do by hand are the same records, on the same log.

Where to go next

Shipping is where the loop closes, and that has its own page. So do the people behind the feedback, the full keyboard list, and pointing an AI assistant at your workspace. Start with Getting started if you have not made a product yet, and see Keyboard shortcuts for the keys and People, not votes for what a person record holds.