The engineering hours hiding in your support queue

Time to set up

2–4 weeks of tracking

Cost

£0

Driver

Technology

The problem

Every week, support passes problems to engineering. Some arrive as bug tickets. Many arrive as a quick message to whichever developer is known to help. Each one is small. Added up, they take a noticeable share of every sprint.

Because the time isn’t tracked, it doesn’t appear in planning. The roadmap assumes a fully available team, so delivery slips. The same issues then come back the following month.

Support often sees a product problem weeks before it shows up in product metrics. Without a number attached, that early warning gets treated as noise.

The fix

1. Label every escalation. Use one label in your helpdesk and your issue tracker, and link the two.
2. Log the time for a short period. For two to four weeks, ask engineers to record time spent on escalations, rounded to 15 minutes. Rough is fine.
3. Group by root cause. Use your contact reasons (see Ten tags that tell you why customers call) so escalations sit alongside the customer problems behind them.
4. Rank the top five causes by engineering hours and by support volume together.
5. Put the top cause on the roadmap as planned work, with an owner and a target date, the same way you’d treat technical debt.

Tools to try

• A Jira or Linear label linked to the original helpdesk ticket.
• Your helpdesk’s built-in integration with your issue tracker (Zendesk, Freshdesk and Intercom all offer one), so the link happens automatically.
• A simple time log in a spreadsheet for the tracking period. You don’t need new tooling to get a first number.

How to measure it

Track engineering hours spent on escalations per month as a share of sprint capacity, and the escalation rate per 1,000 support contacts. As the top causes get fixed, both should fall and the hours go back to the roadmap.