Question 2
Managing technical debt
How do you decide when to pay down technical debt vs continue shipping features?
Answer outline
Treat debt as risk with interest. Pay it down when its cost in incidents, lead time, and morale outweighs the cost of delaying the next feature.
Frame the decision in business terms. 'This slows every checkout change by about X' lands better than 'the code is ugly'.
Handle the small fixes inside every sprint. Schedule larger debt work as its own project with a named outcome and a deadline, so it doesn't drift for months.
Principles
- Quantify the cost where you can: incident frequency, build time, crash rate, and time to ship similar PRs.
- Small fixes ride along in every sprint, and larger debt work gets its own named outcome and deadline.
- Make the case in business terms like lead time and incident counts, because 'ugly code' persuades nobody.
