On most of my projects we have enlightened PMs who make allowances for paying down tech debt. For example, on my most recent rotation (an RoR app front-end to m

On most of my projects we have enlightened PMs who make allowances for paying down tech debt. For example, on my most recent rotation (an RoR app front-end to manage cloud orchestration software), the PM and tech lead worked out an arrangement where, for the four weeks following "feature freeze", half the dev time was spent paying down tech debt and other chores (the other half was spent fixing bugs).