This was a document our product team created to help prioritize data bugs during the launch of a key enterprise partnership that saw users jump from a few thousand to 100K+ overnight.

As a result, the company's core data platform was buckling under the strain and about to fall apart. The engineering team was overwhelmed with bugs and derailed from building a new platform to handle the increased load. Meanwhile, hundreds of new issues were popping up each week.

In response to the massive increase in bugs, the data/engineering team was split into two parts: a feature team working in two-week sprints to develop V2 of our platform and a triage team working in kanban to tackle bugs based on priority.

A temporary GTM task force was created to help improve communication and coordination between the engineering team and stakeholders. This helped identify priorities and provide key updates on progress. Our previous list of priorities was loosely defined, so moving to the 6-tier structure helped organize workload and responsibilities. As the number of bugs shrank and our team became highly accountable, we were able to shift to a 4-tier system (seen below).

We developed and agreed upon these SLAs to drive engineering response and communication of status and resolution.

Incorporating both Action SLAs to address bugs and Communication SLAs to update the relevant parties was a game-changer in this scenario.

The temporary GTM task force improved communication, helped coordinate priorities and held weekly meetings to review tickets.

The task force was able to groom the backlog, assign or confirm priority, and close out tickets that were no longer valid.

Moving to this model helped reduce overall bug count from 750+ in a single month to under 200; after two months it was down to 100, and after one quarter it was down to 50.

The highest priority level bugs (Blockers and P1s) went from 30+ to 10 in the first month; by the end of the quarter, it was down to 1-2, which were able to be addressed within 24 hours.

To prevent team burnout, team assignment was temporary and known in advance; unless requested, all members would complete some planned work within the quarter (cycling off triage team).

This ensured the features team was moving forward with 2 week sprints for V2 of the platform while bugs were continually addressed.

The task force helped to evolve from a "pile of bugs" to an organized stack with reduced size and clear priorities. These priority levels were re-defined to encourage the right focus and response from the teams.

The result was both quantitative and qualitative; bug count went down, churn was positively impacted (reduced), and the teams were happier with the improved communication.


Henry Behnke  

As the result of a new partnership, our website and marketing platform saw a huge increase in users and was buckling under the load. Using this prioritization process, we reduced bugs by 90% and continued building a new platform.

Prioritization process changes to reduce 90% of bugs at Placester

Example Priority Levels

What We Started With:

What We Ended Up With:

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