Your question is Balance Debt and New Features. Take a moment with it on the right.
Talk me through your thinking if you like. When you're confident, submit your answer and I'll grade it like a real screen (7/10 or better passes).
You are the Engineering Manager for a B2B SaaS platform that supports a high-volume operations workflow. The team has a backlog of customer-facing feature requests, but the core service is becoming harder to change: release cycles are slowing, incident volume is rising, and several engineers are warning that the codebase is close to blocking the next quarter’s roadmap. At the same time, Sales is pushing for two committed features tied to renewals, and Product wants to preserve delivery velocity for a planned launch.
How do you prioritize technical debt versus new feature development?