If you are managing a product, you need to be clear about what drives value and what doesn’t. Not all bug fixes and refactors are worth it.
BAU (Business-as-Usual) work—bug fixes, maintenance, and tech debt—is a silent killer of product innovation. Left unchecked, it drains engineering resources, slows down feature development, and keeps teams stuck in a reactive firefighting loop.
The best product teams don’t just balance BAU and innovation—they use BAU to accelerate innovation. Here’s how:
1. Measure Innovation Rate—Or Lose Control
You can’t win on tech debt. You have to keep paying it down and making strategic bets on when to invest and when to move fast.
You can’t fix what you don’t measure. Most teams have no idea how much time they spend on BAU vs. building new products. The best way to track this is by measuring the Innovation Rate—the percentage of effort spent on new capabilities versus maintenance.
How to Do It:
- Tag every task in Jira (or whatever you use) as:
- New Feature / Innovation
- Maintenance / Tech Debt
- Bug Fixes / Incidents
- Analyse Trends: BAU is eating your roadmap alive if less than 70% of work goes into innovation.
- Use Data to Push Back: Show leadership how constant BAU firefighting slows innovation.
2. Turn BAU From a Burden into a Competitive Advantage
Most teams treat BAU as a necessary evil to get through before returning to “real” product work. That mindset is a mistake. The best teams use BAU to accelerate feature development instead of slowing it down.
How to Do It:
- Automate the Boring Stuff – If engineers are constantly fixing deployment issues, automate deployments instead of manually patching things.
- Fix the Right Tech Debt - Don’t clean up code unquestioningly. Prioritise debt that directly slows down feature velocity.
- Batch Low-Value Fixes – Instead of fixing minor UI bugs individually, bundle them into a quarterly UX cleanup sprint.
3. Proactively Manage BAU—Don’t Let It Manage You
It’s not about managing the backlog. It’s about managing risk and opportunity.
Many product owners react to BAU requests instead of controlling them. If everything is urgent, nothing is strategic. The best PMs set strict guardrails around BAU work.
How to Do It:
- Cap BAU Work at 30% of Sprint Capacity – If requests exceed that, they wait until the next sprint.
- Enforce "No Emergency Fixes" (unless critical) - Not every bug needs an immediate fix. Set clear criteria for what qualifies as a true emergency.
Final Takeaways: How to Escape the BAU Trap
Measure Innovation Rate – BAU strangles new development if it's too low.
Use BAU to accelerate, not block, and innovate – automate, batch, and prioritise strategically.
Take Control of BAU – Set hard limits, enforce guardrails, and use data to push back.
Product owners don’t just manage roadmaps—they manage how time is spent. If BAU is out of control, your product velocity will suffer. The best teams don’t just balance BAU and innovation—they make BAU work for them.