Welcome to your interview.
The question is on your right: Refactor Versus Feature Delivery. Take a moment with it first.
Talk your thinking through with me if you like - when you're confident, submit your answer and I'll grade it like a real screen (7/10 or better passes). Discussion and graded submissions share your five interviewer interactions, so spend them well.
You’re leading an engineering team that is under pressure to deliver customer-facing roadmap commitments, but the codebase has accumulated enough technical debt that delivery speed and reliability are starting to suffer. Product wants visible feature progress, while engineering sees rising maintenance cost, incident risk, and slower cycle times.
How do you decide whether to invest in refactoring versus delivering new features?