📣 The bug that used to live in our backlog for a quarter

On Wednesday I told you about a phone call that caught me off guard. A friend asked what's actually changed in my day to day since AI showed up, and I gave her the smooth, rehearsed version instead of the real one, a tool here, a shortcut there, nothing she could actually picture.

I said I'd come back with the real answer. Here it is, and it starts with a bug that sat in our backlog for a quarter.

There was a bug in our reporting flow that customers had been working around for months. Not dangerous, just annoying enough that it kept showing up in support tickets every few weeks, each time getting the same answer: known issue, here's the workaround.

A few weeks ago it came up again.

Old me would have filed it and waited for a sprint with room. This time I went and looked at the logic myself. I drafted a rough, really rough, PR, a starting point my frontend team could react to. They caught an edge case I'd missed and cleaned it up. It shipped later that day.

That's the same-day version. If my friend had asked what happened, I could've stopped there. But she asked what changed, and that's a different question.

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There was a bug in our reporting flow that customers had been working around for months. Not dangerous, just annoying enough that it kept showing up in support tickets every few weeks, each time getting the same answer: known issue, here's the workaround.

A few weeks ago it came up again.

Old me would have filed it in the blackhole of our backlog and waited for a sprint with room. This time I went and looked at the logic myself. I drafted a rough, really rough, PR, a starting point my frontend team could react to. They caught an edge case I'd missed and cleaned it up. It shipped later that day.

Thats just one example of something thats changed with AI, i can make progress myself on things that aren’t super super high priority.

Start with the PRD for that fix. Maybe 2 pages. A year ago it would have been 12, because I used to pre-argue every edge case in writing just to protect myself from a bad handoff. Now the doc doesn't have to do that work. The team gets into the actual problem earlier, not days into arguing about what the doc is meant to solve or whether every edge case is mapped. What matters is whether we nailed the problem, understood why we're solving it, and had a sense of what the solution should feel like.

I drafted it myself. Not because I've become an engineer, but because I could go look at what was actually happening instead of describing the symptom and waiting for someone to diagnose it. My frontend team got something to react to and improve, not something to interpret from scratch. That's the difference between a fix shipping the same day and a fix waiting for a sprint with room, which for a bug like this one usually meant never.

That's the bug, start to finish. But the same shift showed up outside that one ticket too, and this is the part I actually should have led with: it's not really about how bugs get fixed. It's about what handing something off means now, period.

A different project a few weeks earlier: a bulk permissions flow for reports shared across teams. I built a rough clickable version myself, multi-select, a bulk action bar, the basic pattern, before handing it to design. They didn't spend their first two hours untangling what I meant by "bulk edit." They spent it on the actual hard problem: how to show permission conflicts across multiple reports without the screen turning into a wall of warnings. That's two hours of design time redirected to solving instead of decoding what I meant. It's changed how I talk to customers about ideas too: live prototyping when it makes sense, something to click through even if it isn't pixel perfect.

The data side changed too, and this is the one that saves the most time in a normal week. Instead of filing a request and waiting on a pull, I can go get the answer myself, same day. Feedback synthesis moved the same way. I walk into a room with a hypothesis instead of a request for someone else to go find one, so the decision happens in that room instead of in a follow-up meeting a week later.

Workflows tied into GitHub surface status updates automatically now, so Monday mornings stopped being a hunt for where five things stand. An hour a week that used to go to collecting information now goes to deciding what to do with it.

Meetings get more tactical because there's less context to circle through first. Sprints got shorter because there's less dead time between an idea and something testable. More experiments run, because a small bet doesn't cost what it used to. And bugs like the one I opened with, the kind that always lost the prioritization fight against the bigger roadmap item, actually win sometimes now, because fixing one doesn't eat a whole sprint slot anymore.

None of that shows up as an AI feature. It shows up as a bug that used to sit for a quarter getting fixed in a day. That's what I should have told my friend the first time she asked.

Pull up one thing in your backlog that's been there so long it feels invisible. Ask honestly: is it still there because it's genuinely low priority, or because fixing it has always cost more than it seemed worth? If it's the second one, that's worth a second look this week, not next sprint. The cost of a lot of these fixes has quietly dropped, even if the priority conversation hasn't caught up yet.

The AI story that actually matters isn't the tool list. It's the stuff that used to be permanently deprioritized finally getting unstuck. That's a customer feeling, not a productivity metric.

Reply and tell me: what's sitting in your backlog right now for the wrong reason?

P.S. If you're still writing the twelve-page version to protect yourself from a bad handoff, that's exactly the shift we can dig into together. Book your next call with me here →

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