How to find bugs and prioritize fixes as a PM

Bugs happen. 🐞 As a product manager (PM), it’s your job to round them up, determine which ones need addressing first, and loop in the right people to roll out fixes.

The trick isn’t just fixing fast—it’s spotting patterns, prioritizing smartly, and turning every bug into a chance to make your product stronger.

This guide shows you how product managers (including some of our own!) find, prioritize, and fix technical errors and UX issues, so you can follow their examples and build great product experiences.

5 popular ways PMs find bugs and UX issues

There are 2 main approaches to finding product and website bugs: passive (i.e. letting users report them to you) and active (i.e. you go looking for them). 

Here are some common ways you can combine these approaches to get a 360-degree view of the biggest issues affecting product adoption and usage.

1. Collect user feedback

If a problem is annoying enough that users create a support ticket or send you feedback, it’s definitely important enough for you to investigate. 

Give users as many ways to report problems as you can, including

• Support tickets

• Feedback buttons

• Surveys

Support tickets

Your customer success team is likely already collecting support tickets and looping you in where relevant. Regularly view and tag tickets to find mission-critical bugs and quantify recurring issues that affect multiple users. 

If the comments users leave are not detailed enough to give you a full understanding of an issue, combine support tickets with session recordings (see more on how to use these below) to get context about what needs fixing.

Feedback buttons

A feedback button or embedded widget is a low-friction way to collect product feedback, real-time ratings, and comments directly from your users. 

Not every user is going to neatly report bugs for you, but around 0.2% of users leave product feedback—and most of it will be negative. That might sound like a downer, but the truth is your users are making it easier for you to do your job and improve the product.

If you’re using Contentsquare, your users can access the feedback widget from any page, giving you more context about what may be broken or misfunctioning. 

Contentsquare’s feedback widget lets users tell you how they feel about your pages

Using feedback buttons to collect website feedback from all visitors and product feedback from logged-in users helps PMs discover issues that contribute to customer churn, but it can also highlight problems that stop conversions from happening in the first place.

💡 Pro tip: use Contentsquare integrations to get product feedback sent straight to Slack or Microsoft Teams so you don’t miss critical bugs. 

Internally, we send feedback from different parts of the site to dedicated Slack channels (e.g. product feedback goes to the #customer-feedback channel). This keeps updates super relevant and helps the team discuss next steps in Slack together.

Surveys

Surveys triggered at the right point of the user journey help you discover new issues and get more context from negative quantitative ratings.

Here are some scenarios where you, as a product manager, might want to trigger a survey to find potential issues:

• When users leave a negative feedback rating, for example, Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) detractors

• When users churn (try our free churn survey template if you’re not sure what to ask)

• When a key conversion page, like our pricing or sign-up page,  starts underperforming suddenly, 

• When users show signs of frustration. For example, when they’re rage clicking or u-turning

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🤖 Pro tip: if you use Contentsquare Surveys, you don’t need a spreadsheet to analyze open-ended questions—our powerful built-in AI feature will do it for you. Generate summary reports with a single click and quickly identify findings, quotes, and key insights.

Contentsquare's Sense AI generates reports for you so you can focus on what matters most

2. Review session replays

Session recordings (or replays) are video playbacks that show how real users interact with your site and product across multiple pages. Product managers use them to find issues in 2 main ways:

• To proactively look for bugs in new roll-outs and updates

• To investigate bugs flagged in support tickets and feedback

Contentsquare’s Session Replay in action

Joanna Kowalik, Digital Analyst at Co-op Food, used Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool to uncover the cause of a website error that resulted in drop-off at the payment stage.

By setting up Session Replay for that specific customer segment, the engineering team reviewed sessions and discovered customers were being redirected back to the basket instead of completing their purchase. Once this was fixed, the team saw an 11x ROI from the improvements made in the conversion flow.

Here’s how to use Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool to find bugs quicker: 

• Replays are automatically tagged with a frustration score, so you can skip straight to problem sessions 

• Click through to relevant replays from other Contentsquare tools, including Surveys, Journey Analysis, and Heatmaps to get more context

• Filter replays by errors, u-turns, and rage clicks to skip straight to relevant issues

Click the play icon in any Contentsquare tool to view related session replays 

3. Check conversion and traffic funnels

Funnels provide a zoomed-out visualization of where you’re losing users and customers, whether that’s before the point of conversion or during product usage. Think of funnels as a warning sign: they tell you where there’s a problem, but you’ll need to investigate what exactly is wrong using other bug-finding tools like session recordings and surveys.  

Click the play icon in Contentsquare’Funnel Analysis to view relevant session replays

4. Track rage clicks

Rage clicks happen when a user repeatedly clicks on the same element during a session (we define it as 5 clicks within 500ms). 

Rage clicks are a strong indicator of user frustration and easy to keep track of in Contentsquare by

• Segmenting heatmaps by users who ‘rage tapped’  to visualize aggregate frustration on any page

• Filtering session replays by rage click to see what individuals do before and after clicking in anger. Once you identify a rage-click area, you can review it to understand if page or product bugs are causing user frustration.

Start with the Contentsquare heatmap that gives you the clearest picture of engagement

5. Monitor errors

Not all users leave feedback when they encounter an error, and some may not even realize something’s wrong at all. That’s why you need to monitor product and website usage at the infrastructure level to find bugs as they show up for users. 

Some PMs use cloud monitoring tools like Datadog to track how the website is performing on the backend. On the front end, Contentsquare’s Error Analysis tool captures JavaScript and API errors that users experience during a session.

Contentsquare’s Error Analysis tool in action

Our Alerts capability notifies you of any new issues in Slack (via Contentsquare’s integration). You’ll be able to see details of the error, view logs, and create a Jira ticket directly from Slack to optimize your workflow and immediately start working on fixes with your team. 

Get alerted of any new error spikes with Contentsquare’s Slack integration

How to prioritize bug fixes and get issues actioned

Not every bug you find using the above methods can (or should) make it onto your list of critical fixes. Here are some ways our PMs keep track of issues, decide which ones need prioritizing, and communicate with dev teams to get things fixed. 

1. Keep an archive 

Every bug and issue you find needs to be logged somewhere that’s accessible and visible to everyone on your team. This way, you avoid duplicating work and quickly spot when the same issues cause problems for multiple users. 

The Contentsquare product team uses Jira to stay aligned and collaborate with the engineering team. We use Contentsquare's Jira integration to create issues straight from session replays, heatmaps, errors, and survey responses. 

Create Jira tickets easily directly in Contentsquare’s tools

2. Apply a prioritization framework

Just like with product updates, using a product prioritization framework will help you evaluate bugs and sort critical issues from lower-priority ones. 

Popular prioritization frameworks include

• RICE: Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort

• MoSCoW: Must-have, Should-have, Could-have, Won’t-have

• Kano: potential to satisfy customers vs. implementation investment

• Cost of delay (CoD) analysis: how much revenue is lost by not making the change

Whichever framework you use, you need to quantify how big problems are and what it will take to fix them. That’s where it helps to have a centralized issue repository in a tool like Jira or Linear so you can get input from other team members.

3. Share with your team

As a product owner or manager, you probably aren’t responsible for fixing bugs yourself, but it’s on you to loop in a developer or engineering team to act.

Sharing insights with your dev team helps them build empathy for customer struggles, motivating them to make improvements and giving them tangible ideas for resolving bugs. 

There are a couple of ways to achieve this:

• Ensure you’ve added session recordings to issues in tools like Jira, Linear, or Asana (via Contentsquare’s integrations) for context

• Share evidence of how bugs affect users and product usage to get buy-in for changes (create Jira tickets directly in Contentsquare’s Error Analysis to speed up troubleshooting)

• Share snapshots of bugs and issues you spot while watching session replays and share them with your team to brainstorm solutions 

Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool lets you take snapshots of moments you want to share with your team

Integrate bug-hunting into your product workflow

If you’ve read this far, you now have a good idea about how to integrate bug-hunting into your product workflow. And if you’re looking for one platform that can help you find, collect, and share bugs with your team in multiple ways, Contentsquare is a great place to start.

FAQs about how product managers find bugs