Why finding bugs improves product trust

A QA engineer at a fintech startup in Hyderabad spotted a bug. It affected only one test account out of 10. She logged it, but marked it low-priority — “unlikely to affect production.” Another QA at an e-commerce company in Noida saw a similar issue. The bug showed up in 1 out of 10 flows. He flagged it but didn’t escalate — “edge case, let’s revisit after sign-off.” Meanwhile, a QA at Amazon noticed a similar defect. It reproduced in only 10% of accounts. But something felt off. Instead of brushing it off, → he pulled legacy data → traced backend configs → simulated multiple scenarios. What he found shocked everyone. That “10%” included the company’s top-paying enterprise clients. Had it gone live, the business would’ve lost contracts, trust, and revenue. So the team halted release. Fixed the issue. And avoided a high-impact escalation. Honestly, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this happen. It’s happened to me multiple times The bugs that look harmless at first are often the ones that quietly break production later. That’s why I’ve made it a habit: If something feels off, I don’t ignore it. I dig deeper. I ask why. Even if it’s “just one account.” Now you see 3 QAs Same type of bug Only one saw the full picture Not because he had better tools. But because he thought beyond the obvious. Great QA isn’t about catching bugs. It’s about understanding risk. And sometimes, that “one-off” bug is just the tip of something way bigger. The best QAs don’t test features. They test assumptions. And that’s what protects the product before things break. P.S. I'm Raghvendra - a QA II at Amazon.  Follow me for more insights on QA, SDET, and engineering daily.  

The secret to embracing technical quality in product management that unlocks long-term success: Stop treating it like an afterthought. "But isn’t shipping features more important than backend fixes?" - you probably ask. No. Here’s why: • A slow, clunky product with random failures? Users leave. Fast. • Neglecting stability means downtime, crashes, and bugs that silently erode user trust. • Fixing performance later is costly, time-consuming, and painful. Just ask any PM who ignored it I learned this the hard way. Early in my career, I focused on delivering new features. I dismissed “stability work” as something to handle later. And at first? It seemed fine. 👍 Users were happy. 😀 Growth was steady. 📈 Until it wasn’t. 😱 A small bug in one update crippled a key feature. A long-awaited success turned into one nightmare of a night. Random crashes turned into support nightmares. Costly contract discounts had to be offered to keep clients. Database slowness forced us to pause everything and rebuild our databases with new indexes. It's clear as day: Performance is a product feature. It’s just as crucial as UX or functionality. Thus, a question naturally arises: "How do you know if you’re handling stability the right way?" Ask yourself: ✔ Do you listen to your team's advice? ✔ Are you regularly fixing high-impact bugs? ✔ Do you have automated crash reporting & alerts? ✔ Do you build with stability and scalability in mind? ✔ Do you book time to find an optimal tech solution? ✔ Have you set up a process to decide which bugs to fix? ✔ Do you find time for code refactors that are truly needed? ✔ Are security vulnerabilities proactively tested and patched? ✔ Is your database optimized with proper indexing and query tuning? ✔ Is performance a recurring discussion, not an emergency reaction? ✔ Do you monitor downtime trends and investigate even small outages? ✔ Do you test under real-world conditions, not just in a perfect dev setup? ✔ Do you stress-test your system under peak load conditions before it’s too late? ✔ Do you set a threshold where bug fixes take priority over new feature development? ✔ Do you optimize performance for low-end devices and slow networks, not just the latest hardware? Stability, scalability, and performance aren’t just a technical concern. Those are the fundamentals that allow your product to operate in the first place. Ignore it at your own risk. Do you believe you dedicate enough time to keep the product 𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 healthy? Sound off in the comments! #productmanagement #productmanager #technicalexcellence P.S. To become a Product Manager who cares for users and product health, be sure to check out my courses on www. drbartpm. com :)

Your first customers won’t love you for being perfect. They’ll love you for how you handle being imperfect. I asked Dean Sysman, CEO of Axonius, when the big break came. His answer is a masterclass for founders: “We went through a bunch of POCs… and the product didn’t work. In security, it’s binary — it works or it doesn’t. And it didn’t. People started second-guessing if this was even possible. I was worried too, but couldn’t show it.” After failing multiple POCs, Dean heads to BlackHat in 2018, hoping one last shot works. Morning call? Disaster. The customer basically says: “Is there anything else your platform can do that I didn’t see?” (Translation: this isn’t valuable.) Dean braces for another “no.” Instead, in a meeting with the decision-maker later that day, he walks in and says: “We know you had issues. But every bug, you fixed in two days. Other vendors take quarters. That’s partnership. And you gave us more visibility than any product I’ve used. Ever.” That was the first “yes.” The turning point for Axonius. Takeaways for founders: • Speed > Perfection. Bugs happen. How you respond defines you. • Radical transparency builds trust. Show your process, not just your product. • Early customers aren’t buying features — they’re betting on your resilience. • Your first users don’t expect you to have it all figured out. • They expect you to show up. Link to the full episode in the comments

Shipping buggy software might be the most underrated competitive advantage in tech 😁 While your competitors are in their fifth round of QA, obsessing over edge cases that affect nobody, you're already in market learning what actually matters to users. Case in point: I've done about a dozen demos of Apollo's new AI Assistant to users over the past week. Some go flawlessly - no bugs or questionable outputs. Then there are others where we get a weird output or error. But guess what? We address them in real time, users see our dedication to getting it right, and we're able to get a better sense of what workflows we need to support before we go full GA. I even feel like users that see bugs, and our team's quick response to solving them, trust us more than they did previously. The sentiment goes up even though you'd expect it to go down after seeing something you weren't expecting. It's pretty interesting actually. Anyway - perfect products are built for perfect worlds that don't exist. Real users have messy workflows, weird use cases, and tolerance for rough edges if you're solving their actual problem. Your users are looking for PROGRESS in how you help them solve their problems. Not perfection :-)

🧠 Most engineers underestimate the real job of QA. It’s not just about finding bugs. It’s about protecting the user’s trust. Too many teams treat QA like a checklist. Test cases? ✅ Coverage? ✅ Release ready? ✅ But what about: – the moment a user gives up and never returns? – the broken flow that causes silent churn? – the missed insight that could have saved hours of dev time? The best QAs I’ve worked with? They think like users and advocate like PMs. They know that quality isn’t just test coverage — it’s confidence. Confidence for the team. Confidence for the user. Confidence in what you ship. Let’s stop hiring bug hunters. Let’s start building product thinkers. 👉 What’s one “non-QA” skill that made you a better QA? #qa #qualityassurance #productthinking #careergrowth #testautomation #softskills #softwaretesting

Everyone talks about “boosting revenue,” but almost no one connects it with QA’s potential to protect and grow that REVENUE. QA isn’t just a cost center; it’s a driver for customer retention and revenue GROWTH. I recently spoke with a former engineering lead from a well-known music streaming service. The engineering team understood how critical QA was to revenue, but the exec team didn’t see it. So, they strategically injected a few defects, causing some customer churn, and found that after four app crashes, users started dropping off. They had to sacrifice a few customers to drive the point home, get data, and increase customer acquisition and retention in the long term. But HOW do you prove QA’s impact on revenue? 1- Position QA for Customer Retention – A high-quality, defect-free product enhances customer experience and minimizes customer churn. Think of QA as a revenue-preserving function: every defect caught early is a customer retained. 2 - Healthy Demos and POCs—A product with no/low defects means smoother demos and proofs of concept. The first experience with the product matters, and reducing bugs in the demo stages boosts conversion rates by building customer trust and excitement. 3 - Define the Financial Impact of Defects – Calculate a “cost-per-defect” metric to tie bugs to revenue. Here’s a simplified example: if each crash costs a customer, and each customer has a lifetime value (LTV) of $200, then reducing five churned customers a month through better QA practices translates to $1,000 in preserved revenue. This isn’t just theory. When quality IMPROVES, revenue follows.

💰The real cost of finding bugs late - and how we changed that A bug found on local machine during development costs minutes. A bug found in staging / testing environment costs hours. A bug found in prod costs reputations. And in crypto? It can cost millions. Our test strategy used to be "QA will catch it." Spoiler alert: QA doesn't always catch it. Not because the QA is bad - but because they are the last line of defense. So we changed everything: 🔄 Devs started testing their own work 🧠 QA joined discovery, design and planning calls 🧰 We built tools to catch issues earlier The result? Fewer surprises at release Happier engineers And trust - from both users and leadership Good testing isn’t just about finding bugs. It’s about preventing them.