How top product leaders manage product bugs without slowing down velocity

In this special episode, I analyzed 4 concrete perspectives from startup and scaleup leaders who all face the same question at different moments:

How do you manage product bugs while balancing speed, reliability, and user trust?

Across Formance, Lago, Linear, and Pennylane, the contexts are very different: financial infrastructure with strict correctness requirements, billing platforms with strong user impact, developer tools used daily, and accounting software operating under time pressure. Yet the tension is the same everywhere. Shipping fast creates bugs, but fixing bugs too aggressively can slow down product momentum.

Some teams design for zero bugs because any failure has immediate financial consequences. Others deliberately accept bugs as a signal of speed and iteration. Some build strong feedback loops between engineers and users. Others create dedicated structures to contain and resolve issues without blocking execution.

What makes these stories interesting comes from the trade-offs, the cultural choices behind each approach, and the moments when bug management becomes a strategic product decision rather than a purely technical concern.

I broke down these 4 perspectives to extract clear, actionable lessons on managing product bugs, especially in environments where product velocity, reliability, and user expectations are constantly in tension.

I sat down with to discuss how to manage product bugs depending on your product, users, and company DNA.

Disclaimer: The organizational choices and technical solutions shared in this newsletter aren’t meant to be copied and pasted as-is. Always keep your company’s context in mind before adopting something that works elsewhere! 😊

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Treat reliability as a core product feature, not a QA step

In some categories, bug management starts at design. At Formance, reliability is part of the value proposition and users expect perfect accuracy. That expectation reshapes how teams build and pushes quality concerns much earlier in the process.

“It’s not even about minimizing bugs, it’s actually zero bugs” - Anne-Sybille Pradelles

QA is therefore not treated as a final step. It is embedded throughout the lifecycle, with each feature designed for robustness and tested at every stage. The goal is to prevent failures before they happen rather than detect them after release.

This approach fits business-critical products where errors have financial impact and trust drives adoption. It comes with trade-offs such as slower cycles, higher complexity, and increased cost, but it creates a strong moat around reliability.

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Multiply testing layers to catch what internal teams miss

Internal QA alone is rarely sufficient. Formance uses multiple layers of testing, each designed to cover different blind spots and increase overall confidence in the product.

Testing is first embedded directly into development. Then, external tools simulate many environments and configurations to uncover edge cases quickly. Finally, open source users test the product in real-world conditions, often pushing it beyond expected usage.

This creates a powerful feedback loop where bugs surface through usage diversity. It brings broader coverage, independent validation, and real-world stress testing without requiring proportional internal resources. Quality improves significantly when testing is decentralized.

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Make engineers accountable by exposing them to users

Bug reduction often comes from organizational design rather than tooling. At Lago, engineers are directly exposed to users and responsible for support, which creates a strong feedback loop between building and debugging.

“All engineers do support” - Anh-Tho Chuong

Engineers see how users interact with features and where friction appears. They understand the real impact of bugs and become more proactive in fixing and improving their work. This removes silos between product, engineering, and support while leading to simpler and more robust solutions.

This model works well in early-stage environments but requires strong communication skills, user empathy, and clear prioritization to avoid overload.

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Turn bug fixing into a visible and continuous habit

At Linear, bug fixing is part of the product rhythm. The team publishes a weekly changelog that highlights fixes and improvements, making progress visible both internally and externally.

This reinforces a culture of continuous improvement, builds trust with users, and creates a clear cadence for shipping. Teams align around smaller, more frequent improvements instead of large, infrequent releases.

“We prefer fixing what’s in production and making it work really well before building more” - Adrien Griveau

Small bugs accumulate and degrade experience over time. Fixing them consistently reduces frustration and churn, while the changelog acts as a lightweight roadmap that structures delivery.

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Define your bug tolerance based on your company DNA

There is no universal standard for acceptable bugs. At Pennylane, speed is prioritized and a higher number of bugs is accepted as a trade-off to maintain velocity.

“We had 140 bugs in our backlog” - Arthur Waller

This reflects a deliberate strategic choice. Some companies optimize for stability while others optimize for speed. Pennylane uses dedicated firefighting squads to resolve issues during critical periods, allowing the rest of the team to continue building.

The idea of a bug budget also emerges, where bugs can signal progress. The key is alignment between product criticality, market expectations, and company culture.

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Don’t let bugs accumulate without ownership and thresholds

Bug backlogs grow quickly without structure. Pennylane addresses this by assigning dedicated teams to bug resolution and tracking key metrics such as response time and volume.

This ensures bugs are actively managed rather than passively collected. Defining thresholds for backlog size, resolution time, and severity helps maintain control and prevents chaos.

Structured tracking enables better prioritization and resource allocation. It turns bug management into a controlled process rather than a reactive task.

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The mistake: applying the wrong bug strategy to your product context

There is no universal best practice. Strategies fail when applied to the wrong context, as each product operates under different constraints.

A zero-bug approach can slow innovation, while a high tolerance for bugs can destroy trust in critical products. Each company reflects its own priorities, from reliability to speed to continuous improvement.

Bug management is therefore a strategic decision. It depends on product criticality, user expectations, growth stage, and company culture. The goal is to build a system that fits your context and evolves over time.

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• Treat bug management as a strategic decision tied to your product category, not just an engineering concern.
• Embed quality and reliability early in the product design phase when operating in critical environments.
• Multiply testing layers by combining internal QA, external tools, and real-world user feedback loops.
• Increase product quality by making engineers directly responsible for user experience and support.
• Build a consistent cadence of improvements through visible mechanisms like weekly changelogs.
• Define a clear bug tolerance aligned with your company’s speed, culture, and user expectations.
• Use dedicated teams or squads to handle bugs during critical periods without slowing down core development.
• Track bug metrics actively to prevent backlog accumulation and maintain control over product quality.
• Avoid copying other companies’ strategies without adapting them to your specific product context.
• Balance speed and quality intentionally, as both cannot be maximized simultaneously without trade-offs.

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My video (in french 🇫🇷) with product leaders

Dive deeper into this topic with Anne-Sybille Pradelles, Anh-Tho Chuong, Adrien Griveau, and Arthur Waller in my latest podcast episode, where we break down real decisions behind managing product bugs across different contexts.

Watch on Youtube

Also available as a podcast (French for now):

Listen on Podcast

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