Scenario

You are the EM for a product engineering team responsible for a customer-facing SaaS platform. The team is split between shipping a high-visibility feature requested by Sales and addressing growing technical debt in the core service layer, where on-call incidents and slow release cycles are starting to hurt delivery. Leadership wants both, but the roadmap only has room for one major initiative this quarter unless you can make a strong case for a different split. You also need to keep the product manager, sales leadership, and your engineers aligned as priorities shift.

Question

How do you prioritize technical debt against new feature development?