Part of the job of a Product Owner is to pay attention to the list of issues in the issue tracker. Not just to get a feeling for the cadence of the project, but to have an impact on its direction.
Paying attention to the issues doesn’t mean just tracking down what bugs are still opened, mind you. Consider the case of a Product Owner with the release due date looming over the horizon: he or she needs to start looking at the list of remaining issues and take active steps to make sure that they are going to get done more or less on time.
