Your question is Manage Technical Debt Without Slowing Delivery. 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 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.
How do you approach technical debt within your team?