So I'm working on something and I get a message from the business owner saying that something is missing in production, we need to fix this quickly. Turns out it's some missing images. We have a placeholder in place, so no harm done, users just see a placeholder image there and it's a minor thing. (These images cannot be uploaded by the user, because no one had the time to complete a feature for it. So business people bother developers.)

Anyway, the business owner escalates this into a request to add those images quickly to the repo and push it to production asap. I said that it can be done, because it is very low risk, but as I've seen this kind of "going straight to the developer with my problems" behavior before, I wanted to bring the issue to a broader audience. Then the product owner (PO) steps in and asks why wasn't he involved in this. Then other PO's step into the conversation as well, because they manage the process to prioritize and handle bug reports. Then someone posts the bug and error prioritization assessment and what do you know, judging the issue from that scale, it ranks as being "low".

"But what do we tell the customers?!". Oh, fuck you! It's one customer! Not everything can be prioritized as critical! If we stop work to fix every single thing we get feedback on without doing a proper assessment and prioritization, that's all we will be doing.

This is why PO's exist. They will push the breaks and assess the situation, then prioritize the work accordingly.