Triage is your team's front door
Every request a team gets is a promise to someone. What we learned answering 40,000 of them, and how triage rules came out of it.
Every request that reaches a product team, a bug report, a feature idea, a question in Slack, is a small promise to the person who sent it. Most teams lose track of those promises somewhere between the support tool and the backlog.
One place, one decision
Triage in Tern is one inbox for every team, and it asks for one decision per request: accept, merge or decline. Not a priority, not an estimate, not an assignee. Those come later, from the team that owns the work.
- Accept moves it to the team's backlog
- Merge adds it to an issue that already exists, and the reporter follows that issue
- Decline closes it, with a note if you want one
Where rules came from
Our own support team was spending the first hour of each day moving requests between teams. The rules they followed were simple enough to write down, so we let them write them down in Tern. That became triage rules in 2.12.
The best rule we have routes anything with the word refund to Payments. It is one line and it saves us about twenty moves a day.