Scenario

You are the EM owning a customer support platform used by enterprise contact-center teams. The product team wants two new revenue-driving features in the next quarter, while your engineers are reporting rising defect rates, slower deployments, and a growing backlog of technical debt in the core workflow service. The business is pushing for visible customer-facing progress, but support escalations are increasing and the on-call load is starting to affect delivery. You need to decide how to balance debt reduction against new feature development without losing stakeholder trust.

Question

How do you prioritize technical debt against new feature development?