Effective Bug Reporting for Product Managers
Eliminating time waste for back-and-forth and building good relationship with engineering team
Both me and
started our careers in tech in quality assurance. We both cut our teeth as manual QA Analysts at an offshore company, complete with detailed spreadsheets, meticulous bug reports, and close collaboration with engineering teams.
While I've carried these QA practices throughout my product management career, I'm occasionally surprised by how bugs are reported by others. Then I remember – not everyone has gone through the rigorous QA training we experienced. This article isn't about writing the perfect bug report; instead, consider it your practical cheatsheet for communicating issues effectively to your engineering team.
What to do
Clear description of the issue. Explain the behavior you are seeing and what you are expecting to see. Make sure to add any assumption or preconditions that you think might be relevant.
Reproducibility. Try to reproduce the issue you have observed, make sure you share each step you took. If issue is no longer reproducible:
do your best describing your actions that led to unexpected behavior as much as you can remember
Note any unusual circumstances
Mention that you can’t reproduce it
Supporting information.
Share screenshots or recorded videos with the issue happening; there are plenty of tools that can help you easily get that from Wistia, Vimeo, Loom to built-in OS tools.
Technical context: what is your browser type and version, OS, device information, any relevant account or user role info;
Technical evidence - error messages, logs, network requests, etc.
Communicating priority order. Depending on the situation I might have a good idea of the impact this issue is having on the end users. Don’t shy away from communicating this. Sometimes reported bugs feel important where in reality they are not, and the other way around. Be upfront on the relative priority of the issue you are seeing.
I understand – looking at the process above, you might be thinking "This is a lot of extra work to add to my already packed schedule." But spending extra 5-10 minutes is going to pay off in the long term.
Why you should do this
Engineering time effectiveness. Most of what I've described above would be part of the engineering team's triage process anyway. By front-loading this work, you're eliminating a lot of back-and-forth that would be happening anyway and accelerating debugging process.
Building strong relationships. Quality bug reports help build trust and demonstrates respect for engineering. It creates mutual empathy and understanding and establishes you as a reliable partner.
Deepening product knowledge. This helps better understand technical architecture of your product, edge cases.
I encourage you to try this approach next time you notice a bug in the product and want to bring engineering attention to it.
Yana’s two cents:
Many PM roles require technical knowledge “to speak the same language as engineers”. This post made me think that bug reporting skills provide the same benefit of streamlining cross-functional relationships and helping smooth engineering’s debugging process, and it’s much easier to learn! On top of this, spending a few extra minutes upfront can lead to a smoother workflow, quicker fixes, and deeper product insights.