Your question is Reduce Technical Debt Before Enrollment Launch. 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 member-facing health engagement platform preparing a major open-enrollment release in 10 weeks. The release includes a redesigned onboarding flow, updated rewards eligibility logic, and new partner data integrations that leadership expects to improve activation before the annual enrollment spike. At the same time, your team has accumulated technical debt in the services that power enrollment status, incentive calculations, and notification delivery, and those areas have caused several Sev2 incidents in the last quarter. Product wants all committed features shipped before enrollment, while senior engineering leadership is pushing for visible debt reduction after repeated reliability issues, and one of the most critical systems is primarily understood by a single staff engineer who is already supporting production. You need to decide how to balance debt paydown against feature delivery without missing the launch window or increasing operational risk.
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Deadline | 10 weeks to enrollment launch |
| Engineering team | 6 engineers, 1 QA engineer, 1 product manager |
| Critical services with known debt | 3 |
| Recent incidents | 4 Sev2 incidents in last 90 days |
| Peak traffic increase expected | 2.5x during enrollment period |
| New external dependencies | 2 partner integrations |
| Additional headcount | None approved |
| Launch tolerance | No more than 2 hours rollback window |
How would you plan and execute this work so your team addresses the most important technical debt while still delivering the enrollment release on time? Walk me through how you would make trade-offs, align stakeholders, and manage delivery risk as the deadline approaches.