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
Assume a product with 1M+ daily active users, or DAU, and say so as your working assumption. 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 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 for how bad the failure is, crossed with an impact axis for how much of the world it touches, producing a number you can put in a brief and stand behind.
Interactive diagram. Tab through its regions; each focused region shows its detail in the panel below.
The catastrophe in the top-left, high severity and low reach, is exactly the report a volume-only triage buries.