The support inbox was a better map for me than the map I had.

For almost a year I maintained a solid backlog in Linear, groomed it weekly, feeling extremely organized. At the same time, the same four questions were being asked in support. I answered them one-by-one, sometimes twice a day, but did not see any patterns in them.

Then I exported six months' worth of tickets into a spreadsheet and tagged them by topics. Two topics covered 60% of all of them. They were not in my top 10 backlog items.

It took me two afternoons to address the problem. The volume of tickets was reduced by a third.

Do you handle support yourself, do you analyze tickets as whole or deal with them as they come in? I'd really appreciate hearing from people who managed to establish a lightweight tagging routine for more than a month.