hardScenarioBehaviouralStaffLead
How do you decide how much of your team's capacity goes to roadmap work rather than keeping the lights on and paying down debt?
6 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
Measure where the time is going before setting any split, publish the allocation as a policy with a rationale rather than a percentage you invented, route interrupts through one named person, and justify debt work by the delivery cost it removes instead of asking for a refactoring sprint.
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Likely follow-ups
- Your product partner says the debt allocation is engineering taking 20% off the top. How do you answer?
- How do you tell debt worth paying from code that is merely old and disliked?
- Six months of allocated debt work and the team says nothing has improved. What went wrong?
- What do you do in a quarter where a regulatory deadline genuinely takes everything?
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