How to Answer: "How do you prioritize technical debt vs new feature development?"

“I treat technical debt like financial debt—some leverage is healthy, but unmanaged interest compound will stall execution. I implement a two-pronged strategy. First, I reserve roughly 20% of every sprint capacity specifically for tech debt, infrastructure upgrades, and test health. Second, for major architectural debt, I quantify the cost of inaction. For instance, when legacy code increased build times by 30 minutes, I showed leadership that fixing it would save 40 engineering hours per week across the team. We scheduled a dedicated refactoring sprint, which paid for itself in less than two months.”

“I advocate for opportunistic refactoring—cleaning up code as part of new feature delivery in that same domain. When larger debt arises, I log it in a debt backlog with impact tags: High Risk, Slows Velocity, or Latency Impact. During sprint planning, I pair with the Product Manager to include at least one high-impact debt item alongside feature stories.”

“I ensure I leave code cleaner than I found it by refactoring small sections during feature tasks. When I notice recurring bugs or complex code, I discuss it with my tech lead to see if we can log a task for technical cleanup.”