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A data signal is one claim, pulled verbatim out of something a customer or a system said. A line from a Slack thread. A sentence in an app store review. A complaint in a sales call. Signals are the smallest unit of evidence in Squad, and everything above them (clusters, insights, one-pagers) traces back to a set of them.
Data signals
For what happens to a signal after it lands, see The evidence pipeline.

What a signal carries

Every signal has an SI- reference (SI-482) and these fields:

Where signals come from

Four kinds of source produce signals.

Integrations

The providers you can connect today are Slack, GitHub, Linear, Jira, Notion, PostHog, Gong, and Fellow, plus four review sources (App Store, Google Play, Google Reviews, and Trustpilot).

Agents

An agent pointed at a URL reads the page on its schedule and writes signals from what changed.

Documents

Files you upload and knowledge documents in the workspace get read for signals the same way an integration payload does.
Squad only creates signals from sources you have connected. If a tool is not on the Integrations page, nothing from it reaches your workspace.

How a signal gets weighted

Two things decide how much a signal counts: what kind of source produced it, and how deliberately it was captured.
An integration signal is 1.0. That is the baseline, the number the others are measured against. An integration signal is not boosted. Everything else is discounted relative to it.
A signal a product owner captured on purpose counts double. Something an agent discovered on its own, without being asked, counts least.
The two multiply together with the signal’s own strength. That combined weight decides how much the signal pulls its cluster’s centre of gravity and how much it contributes to an insight’s score. Strength also decays with age, so a complaint from two years ago pulls less than the same complaint from last week. The practical effect: one thing a customer told you in a call that you captured yourself outweighs a dozen passively scraped mentions.

The Data Signals list

Open Insights in the sidebar and pick the Data Signals tab. One row per signal, showing the SI- reference and summary, the source badge, whether it belongs to a cluster, its sentiment, and the capture date. Search with Search data signals or SI-… to match on text or reference. The filter toolbar narrows by Source, Cluster (has one or does not), Sentiment, Date, Type, and Strength. Strength offers presets at 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, and 0.8, and filters at or above the value you pick. Sorting and filters are held in the URL, so a filtered view can be bookmarked or pasted to a colleague. Right-click any row for Open, Copy ID, Copy URL, Copy content as JSON, and Delete. Click the row to open the signal.

Inside a signal

The detail page leads with the summary as its heading and the verbatim quote below it, so you read the customer’s words before Squad’s version of them. When the source has a link, the quote card carries it. Cluster. The theme this signal was grouped into, with the cluster’s type and member count. Click through to see the rest of the group. Related data signals. Other signals close to this one. The first three show as quote cards. If there are more, View all opens the full table. Info. Source, sentiment, type, strength, and capture date, in the right-hand panel. Insights. The insights this signal helped produce. This is the payoff line: it tells you whether the evidence went anywhere. A signal that has landed recently, or one in a cluster too small to synthesise, will show nothing here yet. Referenced by. Any one-pager or knowledge document whose body cites this signal.

Cookbook

Check whether a complaint is isolated or a pattern. Open the signal, look at the Cluster card. A cluster with 2 members and a Pending label means Squad has not seen enough of this yet. A cluster with 30 members and a confident theme label means it is a pattern, and the Insights panel will tell you whether it has already been written up. Audit what a source is actually producing. On the Data Signals tab, filter Source to one provider and sort by Date. If a connected tool is producing nothing, or producing noise, you will see it in a few seconds. Fix it from Integrations. Find your strongest recent evidence. Filter Strength to the 0.6 preset and Date to the last month, then sort by strength descending. That is the evidence worth quoting in a review.