Haiku: Trust engineering / Or distrust engineering / Bugs bug me greatly

I-don't-trust-you.

Brian de Haaff sparked some interesting thoughts in his post at the Aha! Blog, which prompted my English major’s brain to conjure up this haiku:


Trust engineering
Or distrust engineering
Bugs bug me greatly

Brian’s big question: Is entering bugs into your roadmap a worthwhile effort or waste of your time? He explains:

I see most teams choose one of two approaches to handle this. And as I mentioned, it is typically driven by a sense of where PM can truly add value and the level of trust that exists between the product management and development teams. Here are the two approaches based on where you fall. I don’t trust the engineering team. I trust the engineering team.

I generally believe in people until proven otherwise, so my default mode is to approach from a trust-based perspective which frees me up to focus on features that will create real value. That said, I do think there needs to be proper filing, tracking, and prioritization of bugs.

And PM’s — if you want to help build trust and credibility with engineering — we should strive to abide by and enforce the golden rule of bug reporting: Steps to reproduce, what you expected to see, and what you saw instead.

How About You?

Do you include all bugs in your roadmap? Or just major ones? Do you find yourself trusting the engineering team to tackle bugs, or do you need to chase after them? How would you characterize the relationship between product and engineering at your company?

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Image source: Yale Stewart’s JL8 Webcomic