Synthiz for product managers

The problem: everyone has heard it before, nobody knows where

A PM accumulates a large amount of material and loses nearly all of it. Fifteen discovery interviews a quarter, support ticket digests, recorded sales demos, competitor webinars, product podcasts, long-form articles, notes from the last conference. This is the material that should ground prioritisation decisions; in practice it lives across four tools and three people's heads.

The symptom is easy to recognise. In backlog review, someone mentions an onboarding problem. You are certain a user described it unusually well — in an interview four months ago, or maybe in a ticket, you no longer know. Without the verbatim, the argument reads as a hunch. A hunch always loses to a revenue number, and the work slips another quarter.

The tools in place do not close that gap. Jira runs execution, not knowledge. A well-kept Notion or Confluence stores documents and degrades the moment three people write in it. A personal Obsidian vault — excellent at linking ideas together, as any good second brain is — stalls on retrieval: finding the exact origin of an observation six months later means guessing the word you happened to use at the time.

The workflow with Synthiz

1. Create one memoire per line of investigation, not per sprint. "Activation friction", "Billing expectations": these subjects outlive any development cycle.
2. Load the raw material. Interviews recorded as video or audio, research PDFs, long-form articles by link. Each source comes back with its transcript, its summary and its concepts.
3. Capture research without thinking about it. The Chrome extension saves the open page in one click, and can capture the transcript of YouTube videos automatically — a competitor webinar or a conference talk enters your base while you watch it.
4. The key move: check whether the problem is already documented. A piece of feedback lands in the support channel and you have the feeling you have read it before. From the extension, search queries your base without leaving the tab and shows the excerpt around what you typed. You see immediately whether this is a one-off or the sixth report, and which source the precedent came from.
5. Subscribe to the feeds that matter: a competitor's product blog, their YouTube demo channel, an industry podcast. Sync runs on its own — hourly, every six hours or daily — and content arrives already processed.
6. Cross-analyse your interviews. The cross-analysis surfaces convergences across several users — the beginning of a pattern — tensions between segments, and blind spots: what nobody ever raises even though you assumed it was central.
7. Write your thoughts. A product hypothesis, a prioritisation call and its rationale, a trade-off you rejected and why. Anchored to their sources, they stop you relitigating the same debate three times.
8. Source your trade-offs. Timestamped citations let you say "here is the excerpt where three users describe the same blocker" instead of "it feels like". That is what moves a decision in a product review.
9. Export to Markdown or PDF into your spec or your framing doc.

What it changes in practice

Situation	Before	With Synthiz
One-hour user interview	Partial notes, recording never replayed	Usable transcript and concepts
"We've heard this before, right?"	An unverifiable hunch	Excerpt found from the extension
Pattern across several interviews	Spotted by human memory	Surfaced by the cross-analysis
Defending a prioritisation	An opinion	Sourced, dated verbatims
Product research	Neglected for lack of time	Subscriptions processed automatically

The real benefit shows up in review: a request backed by five retrievable verbatims is not treated like a PM's intuition. And a base built over a year makes a new PM's arrival on the area far less expensive.

The honest limits

It is not a research repository. No verbatim coding, no shared tags, no collective readouts, no team-wide research repo. If your organisation has a structured user research function, Dovetail or an equivalent is still required — Synthiz does not replace it.

No product data. No analytics, no funnels, no cohorts, no A/B tests. A solid prioritisation call combines qualitative and quantitative; Synthiz covers only the qualitative half. Amplitude, Mixpanel or your warehouse remain essential.

No backlog management. No tickets, no roadmap, no shared plan, no Jira or Linear integration. Synthiz stops at knowledge; execution lives elsewhere.

No team sharing. The base is individual. What you build does not transfer to a colleague, and two PMs on neighbouring areas have no common view. That is a serious limit for team-level compounding.

Interview confidentiality is your responsibility. Content passes through third-party AI services. A user interview contains personal data, sometimes sensitive customer information. Check your internal policy and the consent you obtained before importing anything.

Summaries are generated by language models and miss what often matters most in an interview: the hesitation, the tone, what the user does not say. A verbatim you intend to quote in review should be listened to at its source; traceability to the exact passage exists for that.