Types of Work
In product development, there are two distinct types of work: the work you plan for, and the work that plans for you.
Planned work is the world of roadmaps and strategic initiatives. It’s a predictable process where we define goals, scope projects, and allocate resources to move the company forward. It’s the work we love to talk about.
Unplanned work is the messy reality. It’s the constant stream of bug reports, urgent customer requests, and system alerts that arrive without warning. It’s the chaos that threatens to derail even the best-laid plans.
Ignoring this reality is a recipe for failure. You can't escape unplanned work, but you can manage it. Having a systematic approach is the difference between being constantly reactive and staying in control.
Friction is the Enemy
Before you can manage unplanned work, you have to capture it effectively. The biggest challenge here is friction. If reporting a bug or a customer issue is difficult, it simply won't happen. The issue will fester in a Slack thread, a support ticket, or a salesperson's notes, but it will never make it into your system.
This creates a dangerous blind spot. Your issue tracker should be a source of truth about the state of your product. When intake is difficult, it becomes a source of half-truths, reflecting only a fraction of reality.
The solution is to create a zero-friction intake process. This means instrumenting your organization to capture issues directly at their source.
- Integrate Everything: Your issue tracker should be the central hub. Connect it directly to your customer support tools (like Zendesk or Intercom), your performance monitoring platforms (like Sentry), and your internal communication channels.
- Empower the Front Lines: Your sales, support, and customer success teams are on the front lines. Give them a simple, one-click way to convert a customer conversation into a well-formed issue without leaving their primary tool.
The goal is to ensure that every piece of unplanned work is captured explicitly and actionably, turning scattered noise into structured signal.
Prioritization
Once an issue is captured, the next question is: what do we do with it? Without a clear framework, prioritization descends into chaos. The "loudest voice" often wins, or worse, everything gets dumped into a black-hole backlog, never to be seen again.
To bring order to this process, we use a simple but powerful prioritization matrix. It forces a decision by evaluating every issue against two key axes: the number of affected users (impact) and the (criticality).
