We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed 189 bugs

Summary

It’s Friday at 4pm. I’ve just closed my 12th bug of the week. My brain is completely fried. And I’m staring at the bug leaderboard, genuinely sad that Monday means going back to regular work. Which is weird because I love regular work. But fixit weeks have a special place in my heart.What’s a fixit, you ask?Once a quarter, my org with ~45 software engineers stops all regular work for a week. That means no roadmap work, no design work, no meetings or standups.Instead, we fix the small things that have been annoying us and our users:an error message that’s been unclear for two yearsa weird glitch when the user scrolls and zooms at the same timea test which runs slower than it should, slowing down CI for everyoneThe rules are simple: 1) no bug should take over 2 days and 2) all work should focus on either small end-user bugs/features or developer productivity.We also have a “points system” for bugs and a leaderboard showing how many points people have. And there’s a promise of t-shirts for various achievements: first bug fix, most points, most annoying bug, etc. It’s a simple structure, but it works surprisingly well.What we achievedSome stats from this fixit:189 bugs fixed40 people participated4 was the median number of bugs closed per person12 was maximum number of bugs closed by one personBug Burndown Chart for the Q4'25 FixitHere are some of the highlights (sadly many people in my org work in internal-facing things so I cannot share their work!):I closed a feature request from 2021! It’s a classic fixit issue: a small improvement that never bubbled to the priority list. It took me one day to implement. One day for something that sat there for four years. And it’s going to provide a small but significant boost to every user’s experience of Perfetto.My colleague made this small change to improve team productivity. Just ~25 lines of code in a GitHub Action to avoid every UI developer taking two extra clicks to open the CI’s build. The response from the team speaks for...