Main idea

A large share of the defects in a queue will never be fixed. This isn't a discovery: the team knows it, support knows it, the Product Manager knows it.

Yet the ticket stays open. Closing it amounts to writing "we won't do this", and carrying that sentence to the customer who reported it, to the support team who relays it, to the leadership who saw it go past. Nobody wants to be that person.

Leaving it open costs nobody in particular. That is what makes the inaction stable: the status quo has no author.

Why it matters

This explains the persistence of a stockpile everyone considers useless. The problem isn't informational — the information is shared — it is one of attribution.

A mechanism that forces the decision therefore brings no new knowledge. It designates a signatory. That is where its effectiveness lies, and also its political difficulty.

Nuances and limits

In an organization where refusing carries little risk, the stockpile doesn't grow through this mechanism — it can grow through simple lack of rereading, which calls for a different answer.

Open questions

• Who should carry the refusal: the Product Manager, the support team that raised the signal, or the team that would have fixed it?