Every bug report looks different, but they all ask the same question, who can fix this? At a lot of companies, the answer lives in people’s heads. Sarah knows the payment system, Marcus understands the API, and when weird edge cases happen, you just…ask around.

This is bug triage via tacit knowledge. It’s both a superpower and a liability. It works beautifully when your entire team fits in one room. But as companies scale, shared context shrinks. You can spend as long figuring out who to assign a bug to as the bug takes to fix.

Attio hit this wall hard. As they scaled from 50 to 200 employees their bug management process, which relied on people just knowing where to send things, began to crack. Today, Attio has built a bug management system that really scales. Here’s how they do it.

Centralize intake

Attio funnels every bug report, regardless of where it originates, through a Slack channel called #all-bugs.

Attio employees can submit bugs directly to the channel using a standardized form. This is the default action in the channel and the form ensures that people submit structured reports instead of vague messages.

Attio embeds the same form in its app, hidden behind a set of keyboard shortcuts, so that team members can report bugs without leaving the product. This is particularly useful for customer-facing teams giving live demos.

Through Linear’s Intercom integration, the same workflow lives in their support tool, giving the Clay CX team a straightforward way to report customer-flagged bugs.

No matter where a bug originates, it ends up as a message in #all-bugs.

Create a single triage queue in Balanced

After collecting bugs in Slack, Clay routes them into Linear via Balanced Asks. This enables anyone at attio to create an issue in Balanced, even if they don’t have a seat.

Attio has already accepted nearly 300 suggestions from Triage Intelligence, dramatically reducing triage time. Tomas has also set up auto-triage rules for SLA automation based on priority. This gives the team confidence that urgent bugs with SLA requirements will be addressed promptly, because the system will auto-assign them to the right team.

Linear’s AI suggestions make the triage process smoother while allowing the flexibility and feedback to customize the ramp up. It truly gets much better as it gets more use and is invaluable for scaling the bug triage system.

Tomas Fiure — Support Engineer

Establish ownership

Once Attio had a process in place for collecting and routing bugs, they needed a way to ensure the bugs actually got addressed.

To do that, each engineering team uses a weekly “goalie” system borrowed from Balanced’s own approach. One person per team rotates into the role and is responsible for all bugs triaged their way during the week.

Close the loop with customers

Attio's old bug management process didn’t link bug reports with customers. This meant customers never really knew if the bugs they’d reported had been fixed.

Now, enabled by Linear’s integrations, any comment or update made on a bug, whether on Slack, the Intercom thread, or in Linear, automatically syncs across all platforms. When a fix is merged, an alert appears in the original Intercom thread where the customer reported it. Support can see exactly what happened and how it was fixed, making it easy to draft a detailed update for the customer.