Themes

Themes are the overarching areas of your product that Deck's AI agents detect based on your customer feedback.

For example, for a streaming company, recurring themes could be "Offline Streaming", "Content Recommendation Experience", or "New Content". These may all be recurring topics in the customer's mind, and once Deck detects customers are speaking about them, Deck creates these themes. Every time a customer mentions one of these topics again, Deck automatically adds the new feedback as an insight under the relevant theme.

How Themes Are Created

Deck's synthesis agents analyze every piece of incoming feedback — whether it comes from user interviews, support tickets, Slack messages, NPS surveys, or any other connected source. When the agents identify a recurring topic that does not match an existing theme, they create a new one automatically.

Each theme includes a descriptive name and a summary that captures what customers are saying about that area. As more feedback flows in, the theme grows with additional insights, giving you a fuller picture of how customers feel about that part of your product.

Managing Themes

You can view and manage all themes in the Visualize environment. From there, you can:

• Browse themes to see which areas of your product receive the most feedback
• Open a theme overview to see sentiment trends, category breakdowns, and the underlying insights in one place
• Track trends over time to see whether a theme is growing or fading
• Merge or rename themes if the AI created duplicates or used a name you want to adjust

Themes are the primary way Deck organizes feedback at scale. Instead of reading through hundreds of individual messages, you can focus on the themes that matter most to your product decisions.

Theme Detail Experience

When you open a theme, Deck starts on the Overview page for that theme. The overview combines:

• An editable theme title in the page header so you can rename the theme without leaving the detail view
• A sentiment timeline showing how positive and negative feedback changes over time
• A sentiment breakdown of the feedback in the theme
• An insight category breakdown so you can quickly see whether the theme is driven by pain points, feature requests, bugs, or other categories
• A Theme Insights table with the specific insights and quotes behind the theme

If your organization has access to Subthemes, the overview also shows a lightweight Subthemes summary card. You can use that card to jump straight into a specific subtheme without losing the context of the parent theme.

You can still switch to:

• Interview Highlights for video-backed evidence
• All Insights for the full paginated list of insights in the theme

AI Synthesis (Subthemes View)

For themes with enough feedback (5 or more insights), Deck automatically generates a rich Subthemes synthesis view. Each subtheme opens in its own dedicated detail page nested under the parent theme. The synthesis is rebuilt weekly and includes up to 10 content blocks, depending on the data available:

If a theme has fewer than 5 insights it shows a Below Threshold notice instead of the full synthesis view.

Open a subtheme either from the Visualize → Subthemes page or from the Subthemes summary card on the theme overview.