This is where trust between Product and Engineering is critical. Engineering must be given some "out of band" capacity as you put it, which is locked down and k

This is where trust between Product and Engineering is critical. Engineering must be given some "out of band" capacity as you put it, which is locked down and kept available for Engineering to perform maintenance _as they see fit_. > But that's really hard to maintain in most orgs. For engineering teams with an embedded Product Owner, this is where a good PO can really shine. Show, don't tell, the value of all your maintenance work. Yes, it's hard to show to a nontechnical audience, and yes, it's supposed to be a "safe zone" for engineers to have discretion. But you will lose your maintenance capacity if you don't show nontechnical people the value they're getting out of it. Business leaders understand productivity trends, feature cost, time to deliver, support ticket counts, and aesthetic improvements. Use this to your advantage to communicate in the language they understand, and keep your maintenance capacity.