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Prioritize Debt vs Feature Delivery

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Welcome to your interview.

The question is on your right: Prioritize Debt vs Feature Delivery. Take a moment with it first.

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Problem

Scenario

You are leading an engineering roadmap where the team is under pressure to ship new customer-facing features, but the codebase also has growing technical debt that is slowing development and increasing operational risk. You need a clear way to decide when debt should be addressed now versus deferred in favor of feature work.

Question

How do you prioritize technical debt against new feature development?

What This Tests

  • How you make explicit trade-offs between short-term feature value and long-term engineering health
  • How you build a roadmap that includes both committed delivery and debt reduction
  • How you assess risk when debt affects reliability, security, or team velocity
  • How you align product, engineering, and business stakeholders with competing priorities