Subthemes

Subthemes are AI-detected sub-groupings within feedback themes. Where a theme captures a broad topic area (e.g., "Onboarding Experience"), subthemes surface the specific recurring topics within it (e.g., "Unclear first-time setup steps", "Missing getting started guide").

What Are Subthemes?

When Deck synthesizes your feedback themes each week, it groups related insights into subthemes — tighter clusters of feedback that share a common thread. Each subtheme includes:

• Insight count — how many feedback pieces belong to this subtheme
• Sentiment breakdown — the ratio of positive, negative, and neutral insights
• Trend direction — whether this subtheme is growing, shrinking, or stable compared to the previous period. The colour indicates impact: green means things are improving (positive feedback rising or negative feedback declining), red means things are worsening, and muted means the subtheme has mixed or neutral sentiment
• AI synthesis — a narrative summary, key quotes, and a sentiment timeline generated by Deck's AI

Subthemes give you a more granular view than themes alone, making it easier to identify exactly what users are saying rather than just what topic area they're discussing.

Viewing Subthemes

Navigate to Visualize → Subthemes in the sidebar to see all subthemes across your organization. Summary statistics (total subthemes, total themes covered, total insights, and an overall sentiment breakdown) appear at the top of the page.

When the By Theme sort mode is active, subthemes are grouped by their parent theme in a collapsible accordion — expand a group to see its subthemes. When any other sort mode is active (Trending, High Negative, Latest, Sudden Changes), subthemes appear as a flat sorted list across all themes — each pattern card displays the parent theme name below the pattern name so you can identify context at a glance.

Sorting Options

Use the tabs at the top of the page to change how subthemes are sorted:

Filtering

You can narrow the list using the filter controls in the top-right:

• Search — filter by pattern name
• Segments — scope subthemes to a specific customer segment

Opening a Subtheme

Click any subtheme card to open that subtheme's dedicated detail page inside its parent theme. The subtheme detail view shows the full AI synthesis for the selected subtheme, including:

• A narrative summary of what users are saying
• Key quotes from the underlying insights
• A sentiment timeline showing how sentiment has shifted over time
• Related subthemes within the same theme

From the parent theme, you can return to the Overview page to see the broader theme-level analytics, including category breakdowns and the full insights table.

When Are Subthemes Generated?

Subthemes are created automatically as part of the weekly theme synthesis cron job (runs Sunday evenings UTC). A theme must have a sufficient number of insights before subthemes are extracted from it. If you do not see subthemes yet, check back after the next weekly synthesis cycle or ensure your organization has enough feedback ingested.

Subthemes in Deck Intelligence

You can ask Deck Intelligence (the AI chat widget) questions about subthemes directly:

• "What subthemes do you see in the Onboarding theme?"
• "Which subthemes have the most negative sentiment?"
• "Break down the Product Usability theme into subthemes"

Deck Intelligence will look up subthemes from the latest synthesis and include links to the relevant theme pages in its response.

Subthemes via MCP

If you use the MCP integration to connect an AI assistant to Deck, the explore_subthemes tool gives programmatic access to subthemes:

• List all subthemes across themes (sorted by insight count)
• Search subthemes by keyword or intent (e.g., "onboarding friction", "payment issues")
• Filter subthemes by theme or customer segment
• Drill into a specific pattern to see its synthesis blocks, insight IDs, and sibling subthemes
• Each pattern response includes a direct link to the canonical subtheme detail view in Deck