13. Feedback Loop

Feedback Loop

1. If a significant upgrade or degrade occurs in the prioritized list of issues:

Use email, internal messaging tools or tickets to communicate. Similarly, if a critical issue was prioritized against the emergent issues buffer, it is important to use email, internal messaging tools or tickets to communicate to stakeholders.

2. High priority issue is prioritized mid-sprint:

If an issue has been reported middle of the sprint and has been assigned to emergent issue buffer, then it is important as a PM to notify stakeholders on the details of the impact, what is the cause of the issue and how soon do you plan to fix it?

3. When the critical or emergent issue’s fix is deployed and tested in production:

It is important to proactively discuss with engineering and the QA team on future improvements so similar issues can be avoided. While it is impossible to avoid all issues, look for ways to create systematic improvements that gave rise to an issue. It is also important to share this information with stakeholders to close the loop and help inform their long-term and response planning .

Summary

Bugs can neither be avoided or eliminated fully in a product. As a Product Manager, you can partner with QA to understand the severity of the issue and collaborate with stakeholders to finalize the priority. Once the priority is determined, utilize the ticketing tool (work management tool) to reflect the priority and prioritize the issue to be addressed. It is important to maintain the feedback loop with stakeholders anytime there is a
significant upgrade or degrade in issue priority, a high priority issue is prioritized mid-sprint and fixed.

For bugs that arise due to technical debt accrued over time, it is important for the Product Manager to measure the negative impact of not addressing the bug by collaborating with the scrum team to determine the priority. The negative impact is mapped to a metric or goal that the product, business or engineering, and QA team are tracking actively. Although there are many factors taken into consideration to determine the timeline to resolve the issue, factors such as the risk of delaying the fix and minimize throwaway work are commonly used to fix the issue either in a phased manner or using a combination of short-term and long-term fixes.