Fixing bugs is not a strategy

Illustration by Nik on Unsplash

“The homepage carousel’s broken again.”
“Can we add a new section for the campaign? Just a few pages.”
“The cookie banner’s blocking donations.”

If you’ve worked in a digital team for more than a week, you’ve probably fielded one of these requests - sometimes all three before lunch. None of them are unreasonable. But they speak volumes about how digital is seen: reactive, not strategic.

Somewhere along the way, digital became synonymous with fixing things. Broken forms. Expired certificates. Crashing embeds. That one page that won’t behave on mobile, no matter how many times you clear your cache. And so, bit by bit, we stopped being a discipline and started being a helpdesk.

Most of us in digital are happy to roll up our sleeves. It’s not that the work isn’t worth doing - it’s the way it’s shifted. From strategy and craft to relentless triage. Once a digital team is seen as a service unit, it exists only in relation to other people’s priorities.

We become delivery vehicles. Ticket-chasers. Firefighters. We’re praised for our responsiveness, not our thinking.

You might hear this described, politely, as “agile”. But it’s not agile. It’s the quiet dismantling of intent, repackaged as efficiency. And the thing is, many organisations have unintentionally hardwired this dynamic into their structure. Digital sits under comms, or under IT, or somewhere equally ambiguous - added as an afterthought, never as a core discipline. So it ends up misunderstood and permanently under-resourced.

There’s a human cost to all this.

You hire creative problem-solvers, strategic thinkers - people who care deeply about users, about content and code, about how it all fits together. Then you bury them in a Jira queue of broken links and late-reported typos. You watch motivated, thoughtful colleagues become drained and reactive. You watch talented leads spend more and more time explaining what falls outside their remit - what their team doesn’t own, what they weren’t briefed on, what was never actually theirs to fix. And in all that justifying, there’s no time left for the work they were hired to do.

Let’s be clear: digital teams should care about delivery. About doing things well, shipping on time, making things that work. But they can’t do that if they’re only ever brought in after the fact. Or only ever spoken to when something breaks.

Digital isn’t just the people who update the homepage. It’s not only the person you cc when the embed code isn’t working. And it shouldn’t be the dumping ground for last-minute thinking. Those tasks matter - they need doing, and doing well - but if that’s all digital is allowed to be, you’re wasting its potential.

Digital is a discipline. A mindset. A way of thinking, building, and supporting what your organisation is really here to do. That means you have to protect it. Give it shape. Trust it to say no. Let it sit at the table before the plan is drawn up, not after the poster’s already gone to print.

So next time you find yourself saying “can you just…”, pause.

Because what you’re asking for might be small. But the pattern it sits within? That’s big. That’s the thing that stops digital teams doing their best work. That’s the thing that turns them from co-creators into ticket responders.

Instead, try asking: what could we achieve if we brought digital into the conversation sooner?

Digital teams are not service desks.
They’re not there just to make things pretty, or fix things quickly.
They’re there to help you build something better.

But only if you let them.

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Written by Stu Collett – web veteran & recovering perfectionist.
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