There are many super-important roles in software teams that are also financial overhead, e.g. QA, Support and Bugfix. They’re necessary, but they require people that would otherwise be working directly on business goals. For leaders of these overhead teams, it can be frustrating, having to justify keeping them well-staffed. We often point to the problems in the business that they address: “We need a big bugfix team, look how many bugs we have!”

But what if we flipped our thinking? Instead of denying that we’re overhead; we embrace it. Instead of using the size of the problem to justify the team size; we aim to reduce both. “Let’s halve our bugfix team by halving the bugs we ship in the first place”. In this talk, using personal examples from JIRA QA and Bugfix, Penny Wyatt will describe how this flip in leadership mindset can lead to happier engineers, teams, stakeholders and customers.