You are balancing pressure to deliver new customer-facing functionality with growing technical debt in a core engineering area. Some parts of the system are slowing development, increasing incident risk, and making estimates less reliable, but refactoring will delay roadmap commitments in the short term.
How do you decide whether to invest in refactoring versus shipping new features?
Short-term business impact of new features is easier to explain than long-term engineering health gains.Refactoring often has uncertain scope and can expand if not tightly framed.The right answer may be a split roadmap, not an all-or-nothing choice.