You are leading an engineering initiative where the team is under pressure to ship visible product improvements, but parts of the codebase are slowing development and creating reliability risk. You need to decide whether to invest in refactoring now, defer it, or split capacity between technical debt and feature delivery.
How do you decide whether to invest in refactoring versus shipping new features?
The business wants visible roadmap progress.Engineering sees rising delivery and reliability risk.Not all technical debt is equally urgent.The decision affects both short-term commitments and long-term execution speed.