Main idea

The reflex in front of a hundred tickets is to reread and reclassify everything. The work is considerable and fixes nothing.

A more effective method takes the opposite entry. Each week, support lists the three most frequent customer reports tied to defects. That top 3 becomes the top 3 to handle. The following week, depending on what has been handled, support proposes the next ones.

You move forward through Pareto: what comes back most, what hurts most, what loads support most. The effect is twofold — visible customer pain drops, and support unclogs. Support sees that its reports lead somewhere, developers don't scatter across an abstract list, leadership sees irritants disappear.

Why it matters

The selection doesn't come out of the stockpile, it comes from an outside flow that renews itself. So you don't pay for maintaining the stockpile in order to decide what needs fixing.

It also puts the decision with those who absorb the pain, rather than in a committee reconstructing it from tickets.

Nuances and limits

The ranking only sees what comes up. A serious, silent defect — data corruption, a security hole, a wrong calculation never checked — will never appear in a support top 3.

Open questions

• Which second flow covers the defects support never sees?