Welcome to your interview.
The question is on your right: Balance Tech Debt and Feature Work. Take a moment with it first.
Talk your thinking through with me if you like - when you're confident, submit your answer and I'll grade it like a real screen (7/10 or better passes). Discussion and graded submissions share your five interviewer interactions, so spend them well.
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.
How do you prioritize technical debt against new feature development?