How Fernhill found the import problem hiding in 212 tickets

Fernhill is the sample workspace we use throughout this site — a small-business payroll app with a four-person product team. Their story is illustrative, but the pattern is one we hear often: the evidence was already there, split across tools that never met.

Two studies, one problem

In September, Fernhill’s researcher ran fourteen onboarding interviews. Eleven people mentioned the spreadsheet import, usually as a passing complaint. At the same time, support had 212 tickets tagged “import”, mostly closed with a help-centre link. Nobody had put the two together, because interviews lived in one place and tickets in another.

What changed when they were in one place

• Tickets were imported and tagged with the same taxonomy as interviews.
• The theme “Import breaks on real-world spreadsheets” grew from 34 interview highlights to include 14 representative tickets.
• Filtering by segment showed churned customers mentioned it at almost three times the rate of retained ones.

The researcher also listened back to a sample of tickets from people who had not been interviewed. Several described the same merged-cell and date-format failures in almost the same words, which made it much harder to dismiss the interview finding as a quirk of who happened to be recruited.

The decision

Import had been on the roadmap as a “nice to have” for two quarters. With interview clips and ticket counts on one page, it moved into the next sprint as FERN-412. The readout took fifteen minutes; there was very little to argue about.