"Insight," "Opportunity," "Solution." Every product tool uses these words and none of them mean quite the same thing twice. In Candor they are four connected things, not just labels stuck on a card, and once you see how they chain together the terms stop being confusing.
Here is the chain, using a real example: a customer named Jace messages your widget asking why his transfer has been stuck on pending for two days.
Evidence: where a pattern starts
Evidence is not something you create from scratch. It is a link, an existing support conversation or feedback item that gets attached as proof that a pattern is real. Jace's conversation is one piece of evidence on its own it means nothing, every support inbox gets the occasional confused customer.
The rule Candor uses is simple: the more sources you link, the stronger the signal. One Insight can carry many Evidence items, ten different customers asking the same "is my transfer stuck" question in the same week is a very different signal than Jace asking it once.
Insight: the pattern itself
An Insight is the pattern you have actually noticed, written down with enough structure to act on: a title, a severity (critical down to low), a signal direction (up, down, or brand new) with a value like "+40% this week," a category and segment so you know who it affects, and a status that moves through New, Investigating, and Addressed or Dismissed as your team works it.
Jace's question, multiplied by nine more customers this week, becomes an Insight: "Transfer status confusion during weekend processing windows," medium severity, trending up. That is the moment a one-off support conversation turns into something your product team can actually prioritize against everything else on their plate.
Opportunity: reframing the problem before you solve it
An Opportunity is a single "How might we..." statement attached to that Insight. Its entire job is to stop your team from jumping straight to a fix before everyone agrees on what problem is actually worth solving. Candor deliberately allows only one Opportunity per Insight, this is meant to force one clear framing, not a list to argue over.
For the transfer Insight, the Opportunity might read: "How might we reassure customers before their transfer even shows as pending over a weekend?" Notice that is a question, not a feature request, if you have used an Opportunity Solution Tree before this will feel familiar, though Candor's version is one chain per pattern, not a full tree to maintain.
Solution: closing the loop
A Solution is what your team decides to do about it, and it can optionally link straight to an existing feedback item or roadmap entry. That link is what actually closes the loop, the pattern you spotted in the inbox and the fix you shipped live in the same place, instead of two systems that never talk to each other. If the fix does not correspond to anything on your roadmap yet, you can also just track it without linking.
For the transfer Insight, the Solution might link to a roadmap item that adds a "processing over the weekend" notice to the transfer status screen, the exact thing Candor AI already tells customers like Jace when they ask.
The whole chain, in order
Evidence piles up as real conversations and feedback pointing at the same thing. Once there is enough of it, it becomes an Insight, a named, ranked pattern instead of a vague feeling that "people keep asking about this." The Insight gets an Opportunity, the one framing your team agrees is worth solving. The Opportunity gets a Solution, the actual fix, tied back to your roadmap. None of this needs to happen all at once, you can create the Insight today and add the Opportunity or Solution later, once you actually know what to do about it.
That is what "turn customer noise into product direction" actually looks like once you follow one pattern all the way through.