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Bug Triage & Prioritization at Scale1 / 2

2 min lesson

A severity-by-impact framework

Work through this: "One user reports that an Agent edit silently overwrote files they hadn't saved. Forty other users report a misaligned icon in the model picker. Which do you work first and why?"

Step 1 of 2

At 1M+ DAU the reports never stop. The job isn't to feel busy clearing them, it's to make sure the right one gets worked first - and to be able to defend that ordering to an engineer who'd rather you left them alone.

A Product Quality Engineer on User Operations is the person who decides what's worth an engineer's afternoon. That decision can't be a gut call you redo every morning. It has to be a rubric: a severity axis (how bad is the failure) crossed with an impact axis (how much of the world it touches), producing a number you can put in a brief and stand behind.

SEVERITY × IMPACT, ON A MAP

Interactive diagram. Tab through its regions; each focused region shows its detail in the panel below.

diagram: quadrant

The catastrophe in the top-left - high severity, low reach - is exactly the report a volume-only triage buries.