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 down when the cost (incidents, lead time, morale) exceeds the opportunity cost of delaying a feature.
Frame decisions in business terms — 'this slows every checkout change by ~X' beats 'the code is ugly.'
Principles
- Quantify where you can: incident frequency, build time, crash rate, time-to-ship similar PRs.
- Batch small fixes in every sprint; ring-fence larger debt paydown with a named outcome and deadline.