Theres a balance between shipping product and maintaining “quality”. The challenge in this case seems to be defining quality or “good”. Youre up against an easi

Theres a balance between shipping product and maintaining “quality”. The challenge in this case seems to be defining quality or “good”. Youre up against an easily measurable force. Mainly, money is made by accumulating technical debt, with nothing to balance it out. If you fight against this directly, youre going to have a bad time. Take this opportunity to figure out how to define and measure the quality of the product (not the code) from a technical perspective. Think deploy frequency, build times, response times, uptime, etc. Once you have that, you can have a discussion with your peers about tradeoffs that are being made. Thats usually when you can introduce budgets where theres a balance in a sprint between engineering stuff and product stuff. Try a 25/75% split for now and then use the metrics to shift the ratios up and down depending on the quality of the system. Yes its tons of work. No there arent any shortcuts. :)