Scenario

You are the Engineering Manager for a product team shipping a high-traffic consumer workflow. Over the last two quarters, the team has accumulated technical debt in the core service, and now new feature work is slowing because engineers are spending more time on regressions, flaky tests, and brittle release steps. Product wants to keep shipping, leadership wants fewer incidents, and the team is asking for time to clean up the codebase before the next major launch.

Question

How do you approach technical debt within your team?