How product teams use Sense to spot issues and get stakeholder buy-in faster

You shipped a feature. Now you need to know: are users finding it? How are they using it? Where are they getting stuck? And what do you focus on next?

Getting those answers shouldn’t mean stitching together data from multiple tools, watching hours of session replays, or waiting days for an analyst to surface insights. But that’s often what it takes. By the time you have the data, the roadmap conversation is already underway—and you’re left trying to make the case for your priorities without the evidence to back them up.

Sense, Contentsquare’s built-in AI analytics tool, changes that. You get answers you can act on right away—and the evidence to make a compelling case for what deserves priority on the roadmap. 

In this guide, we show you six ways product teams use Sense to move faster, make better decisions, and prove the impact of their work.

Key insights 

• Most product teams struggle to quickly connect a drop in a key metric to its root cause—and quantify the business impact. Sense does this for you in minutes, so you see what needs attention and decide what to do next.

• Manually checking the same metrics for changes takes time. Newsroom runs scheduled analyses and surfaces notable changes, risks, opportunities, and wins.

• Combining behavioral data with user feedback helps you avoid investing in the wrong fix. Sense’s Sentiment Analysis confirms what users are experiencing, so you can make the right changes.

• Technical errors take longer to resolve when engineering receives a vague ticket. Sense summaries turn error details, affected users, impact, and reproduction steps into a clear brief your team can act on.

6 ways product teams use Sense to investigate issues and decide what to fix 

Sense draws data across Contentsquare—so when you ask a question, it pulls data from multiple capabilities—including Heatmaps, Session Replay, Surveys, Impact Quantification, Error Analysis, and Journey Analysis—to show you what's happening, why, and which issues have the greatest impact on retention and revenue. 

You don’t have to export your data and feed it into a separate AI tool. Sense already has access to your behavioral data, errors, survey responses, and product analytics, so it can investigate the full user journey without having to manually supply the context.

Here are six workflows you can complete faster with Sense.

1. Monitor a launch and catch issues early

Say you’re an ecommerce product manager trying to understand whether a new checkout step is helping or hurting conversion. Newsroom—a Sense Analyst feature—saves you hours of manual analysis.

Newsroom works like a team of AI analysts continuously investigating your data on its own, with your context built-in. It surfaces what has changed, what needs your attention, and how urgent each finding is. Then, it organizes the results by priority, so critical issues appear before less urgent findings.

Newsroom presents its findings as curated cards across five severity levels—critical (red), risk (orange), opportunity (yellow), win (pink), and info (blue)

You can click into any card to review the full analysis and recommended next steps. Then ask follow-up questions to dig deeper—for example, ‘Why are fewer users completing the new checkout step compared to last week?’ or ‘Is the drop-off happening more on mobile or desktop?’

Did you know? Newsroom also sends a digest of the latest findings straight to your inbox at your preferred cadence—such as every Monday before your sprint planning meeting. This gives you the evidence you need before the call starts, so it’s easier to align the team on priorities and decide where to focus for the week.

2. Find what's causing friction and fix it faster 

The first sign of friction is often a metric that suddenly drops—like onboarding completion or conversion to the next step. But the number alone doesn’t tell you why users are getting stuck or what to fix first. Sense Analyst, Contentsquare’s AI agent, can. 

Give it a direct instruction, like "Do a detailed analysis of my checkout funnel, showing where users are getting stuck and why. Give me the top five things to focus on to improve conversion." Then, it investigates the flow—pulling data from Journey Analysis, Funnels, Session Replay, and Error Analysis—and comes back with the specific issues behind the drop-off and a list of what to fix first to reduce friction.

Sense Analyst can use relevant Session Replay evidence and provide links or follow-up flows, depending on the analysis and account configuration And if you created a heatmap for that page, it’s added so you can see how users are interacting with each element.

Sense Analyst surfaces issues, quantifies the revenue impact, and recommends specific fixes

Optimum, one of the leading telecommunications providers in the US, turned to Sense Analyst after noticing a significant drop in checkout progression that its existing analytics tools couldn’t explain. 

Sense Analyst revealed two specific friction points—a continue button that was clickable before required fields were completed and a birthday input field with no proper validation. The team fixed those issues and saw a +7.8% increase in shopper-to-order conversion rate.

Sense Analyst flagged issues and gave Calvin's team recommendations on how to fix them

Pro tip: if you're mid-investigation and realize the flow you're analyzing is missing key steps—like a login page or a payment confirmation—use the Mapping Assistant, built into Sense, to  group and organize your site's pages using plain language—like ‘Add all checkout steps’ or ‘Split the payment flow by step.’ Your updates are reflected instantly, so you can keep investigating without switching modules or starting over.

3. Validate fixes before you commit to them 

Behavioral data shows you what users are doing and where they’re getting stuck. But before you put a fix on the roadmap, it helps to hear from users directly, so you can confirm the problem and avoid solving only the most visible symptom.

Sense’s survey generator helps you build a survey to get useful responses fast. 

Just describe what you want to learn, such as, “I want to understand what makes the checkout flow difficult for customer to complete,” and Sense drafts the questions for you. You can then edit them or launch the survey as is.

Ask Sense to generate survey questions for you based on your goal

You don’t have to read through hundreds of responses to identify the patterns. Sense automatically rolls all of those replies into a survey summary that includes:

• The most common topics and themes

• Real customer quotes that illustrate each finding

• A breakdown of positive, neutral, and negative sentiment

• Recommended actions based on the responses

Sense provides an overview of key findings from survey answers 

Pro tip: use Sense’s sentiment analysis when you need to examine individual responses behind the summary. 

Sense automatically analyzes each response, groups comments about the same issue together, and labels them as positive, negative, or neutral. This way, it’s easy to identify recurring concerns and spot where frustration is highest.

Compare those findings with the friction surfaced in your behavioral data directly in Sense. If the same issue appears in both, you have stronger evidence that it’s worth prioritizing. Then run an experiment to test whether your proposed fix actually solves it.

Sentiment Analysis tracks how positive, negative, and neutral feedback changes over time, so you can easily spot emerging shifts in user perception

4. Spot retention and churn risk earlier

You don’t have to wait until churn shows up in your quarterly numbers to do something about it.

Using Sense Analyst, you can ask, “What do the first-week journeys of users who are still active after 30 days have in common, compared with users who dropped off?” Then, Sense Analyst compares the two groups and shows where their journeys start to diverge, along with specific next steps to close the gap.

Sense Analyst compares retained and dropped-off users to show which behaviors are linked to retention

You can also set up ongoing product monitoring. Save this question and others you ask often, then schedule them to run at your preferred frequency. Sense Analyst emails the results to your team.

5. Turn errors into engineering briefs your team can act on 

When something breaks, your engineering team needs more than a vague description of the problem. They need to know what happened, who it affected, how to reproduce it, and what the business impact is.

Pulling that context together usually means manually reviewing technical logs and affected sessions. Sense summaries help you do that faster.

There are three kinds of Sense summaries:

• Error summaries explain what broke, who it affected, how widespread it was, and how much impact it had

• Session Replay summaries surface recurring friction points and standout moments, with time-coded links to the relevant parts of each replay

• Zoning summaries show how users respond to page elements, including whether they notice, ignore, or interact with them

Pro tip: start with the error summary when you need to investigate and hand off a technical issue. You can use it to give your dev team a clear brief covering the issue, affected users, reproduction steps, and why it should be prioritized.

Then, use Session Replay and Zoning summaries to provide supporting context—showing what your affected users experienced and how they interacted with the page before the error occurred.

Sense explains what went wrong and shows how much the error is affecting users and the business

6. Get answers without waiting on your data team 

Not every question needs a full analysis. Sometimes you just want to know where users are landing, whether a page is underperforming, or how two segments compare, and you need the answer right away.

Sense Chat lets you ask that question in plain language and get an answer on the spot. It runs the analysis in the most relevant Contentsquare capability—whether that’s Funnels, Journey Analysis, Session Replay, or Zoning. Then, it returns a chart, a written summary, and suggested follow-up questions.

Sense Chat breaks down where users are landing on your site, with a written summary alongside the Journey Analysis visualization

To get clear, usable answers, be specific about the page, segment, and timeframe in your question. “Show me the funnel for checkout on mobile in the last seven days” will get you a better answer than “Show me user journeys.” This is especially useful for mobile analytics, where behavior often differs from desktop.

Ask one question at a time, too. Sense Chat handles one analysis per prompt, so stacking multiple questions in one message can lead to weaker results.

Make Sense part of your product workflow

Start with one recurring workflow that currently takes too long.

Just shipped a new feature or need to know how users are interacting with it ahead of your weekly product call? Use Newsroom to monitor the experience and surface the issues, opportunities, and changes that need your attention.

Noticed users getting stuck in a critical flow? Ask Sense Analyst to explain what is causing the drop-off, measure its impact, and recommend what to investigate next.

Considering a fix but not sure whether it addresses the real problem? Use Sense to build a survey and hear directly from users, then use Sentiment Analysis to identify the themes and reactions that matter before committing the idea to the roadmap.

The more of these workflows you run through Sense, the less time you spend pulling data together and explaining what happened, and the more time you spend making changes that resonate with users and boost retention.

FAQs about Sense for product teams