Switching from Bug-Fix to Product Innovation
Many Teams Get Stuck Bug-Fixing, Here’s How to Break Free
Welcome Leaders!
So your team has been stuck fixing bugs for what feels like months going into years.
You’re barely building any new products or features and people are burning out.
What do you do?
I dive into why companies get stuck in bug-fix mode and the key strategies to leverage to get back to innovating.
Let’s jump in and have some fun NOT fixing bugs! 🪲
Cheers,
The Bug-Fix Tar Pit 🦴
It’s kind of wild to think about, but product & engineering (P&E) teams can sometimes get stuck bug-fixing 🪲 for literally YEARS.
A combination of a large product/customer base, no consistent tech debt remediation strategy, and poor product investment decisions can easily lead to this situation.
I’ve observed this more frequently than you would think.
If the majority of your engineering capacity (and therefore spend 💰) is going towards bug-fixing for years on end, it means less dollars are flowing to new features & products (innovation work).
Of course, a lot of companies simply want to milk their cash-cow and that’s perfectly OK. But that doesn’t mean they should take 10 years and fix every bug in the backlog.
So, why do business’ and teams end up in perpetual bug-fixing mode?
Here’s what I’ve noticed:
Common Reasons Teams Gets Stuck in Bug-Fix Mode
The business may have a culture of working on almost anything their customers ask of them including fixing any of the bugs that come in.
There may be a lot of technical debt & legacy software in the tech ecosystem that has never been cleaned up.
The product design might have never been the right one for the customer base and that manifests as bugs.
The original technology architecture might be really bad.
There might simply be a huge number of customers (vs the size of the team) that the product is serving.
The support & product teams might not be very good at managing the incoming customer demands.
The engineering team might lack highly-skilled developers. Meaning a C-/D+ team could be writing code that’s adding to the bug problem.
The companies product strategy or business model might keep flip-flopping over the years resulting in building a lot of random products that create a kind of “Frankenstein-effect” that can end up generating a lot bugs.
Rarely, but sometimes and in certain industries there may be very serious compliance or security demands that create technical complexity that impact the quality of the software. For example, if new regulatory standards are released and the product has to be made compliant. This might take years during which lots of pieces of the product get refactored which may also generate a lot of bugs.
Let’s go a bit deeper into two of the factors.
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