Interests vs Position — Scenario 15 — Bug Priority between Support and Product
How to distinguish between position and interest when Support demands fixing critical bugs and Product prioritizes roadmap and features.
Lack of objective criteria to prioritize bugs creates friction: Support perceives churn risk, Product needs to advance the roadmap. Establishing metrics and a clear process reduces politics and facilitates impact-based decisions.
Context, Objectives, and Blocker
Support reports several critical bugs affecting customers; Product maintains roadmap and selectively releases hotfixes. There is no clear metric to prioritize by impact.
Context
Support receives incidents affecting customers; Product organizes sprints around features and reduces hotfixes to avoid deprioritizing the roadmap.
Objectives
Support: resolve incidents, reduce churn, and maintain satisfaction. Product: advance strategic features that generate long-term value.
Blocker
Ambiguous priority metric: “customer impact” is not quantified and Product requests hard data (tickets, estimated churn) that Support has not consistently provided.
Detail and practical note
Practical note: Without an objective prioritization framework, decisions become political: “my customer” vs “my roadmap.” A system with shared KPIs and bug SLAs reduces discussion and directs resources based on real impact.
- Risk for Support: increased churn, dissatisfied customers, and escalations.
- Risk for Product: deviation from strategic roadmap, wasted resources on reactive fixes.
Interests and positions
Support
Position: Prioritize and fix reported bugs now.
Interests: Reduce churn, maintain customer satisfaction, and avoid commercial escalations.
Product
Position: Follow the roadmap and avoid excessive priority shifts to hotfixes.
Interests: Deliver long-term strategic features and optimize development capacity usage.
Difference between position and interest
The position decides what is prioritized (bugs vs features). The interest is to keep customers satisfied versus advancing product strategy. Agreeing on interests allows creating objective metrics and processes that respect both goals.
- Examples of interest-based solutions (not just positions):
- Quantitative prioritization system: composite score based on number of affected customers, technical severity, estimated churn, impacted MRR, and ticket frequency.
- SLA and escalation paths: define maximum times for P0/P1/P2 and clear process to activate hotfixes outside sprints (with guardrails).
- Shared dashboard and reporting: real-time data on tickets, affected customers, churn trends, and estimated cost of delay.
- Reserved capacity (capacity buffer): reserve % of sprint for hotfixes/critical operations or have on-call rotation for fast fixes.
- Quantified opportunity cost: calculate roadmap impact (e.g., feature delays and lost value) for informed decisions.
- Commercial prioritization agreements: criteria linking priority to strategic accounts, contractual SLAs, or penalties/rewards.
- Immediate practical action: Propose within 48–72h an RFC/plan with:
- Definition of metrics and scoring formula to prioritize bugs (e.g., Score = w1*#customers + w2*impacted MRR + w3*severity + w4*ticket frequency).
- Critical ticket analysis template: affected customers, reproducibility, workaround, commercial impact, and estimated technical effort.
- SLA by severity (P0: 4h, P1: 48h, P2: 7 days — adjust per context) and authorization process for urgent hotfixes.
- Shared operational dashboard (open tickets, average resolution time, churn risk) and quick daily prioritization/weekly triage meetings.
- Capacity buffer policy or on-call rotation and criteria to temporarily divert resources from the roadmap.
Quick recommendations
- Separate position and interest: ask Support and Product to express their interest in a clear sentence.
- Adopt an objective scoring system to prioritize bugs and eliminate ambiguity in “customer impact.”
- Implement SLAs and a triage process with templates that provide the hard data Product requests.
- Reserve capacity or have hotfix paths with guardrails to avoid diverting the roadmap without quantified justification.
- Measure and review: record decisions, times, and effects (churn reduction, roadmap delay) to adjust rules and scoring weights.
If you want, I can prepare (a) a scoring template and RFC for bug prioritization (formula, weights, critical ticket template, and dashboard) or (b) an SLA policy + operational plan for capacity buffer and hotfix process with authorizations. Indicate your choice and I will prepare it.