Address, Refine, Innovate! 🔧 Here's what I would do to prioritize technical debt effectively. - Audit existing debt; identify areas needing immediate attention to enhance sustainability. 🔍 - Communicate impact; explain to stakeholders how addressing debt improves future features. 📣 - Create a roadmap; develop a clear plan for tackling debt alongside new features. 🗺️ - Allocate resources; ensure dedicated time for teams to focus on technical debt. ⏳ - Foster a culture; encourage team discussions around debt to promote ownership. 🤝 - Measure progress; track improvements to demonstrate value and motivate teams. 📈 A balanced development process ensures long-term stability and innovation.

Well, turning into a feature factory is never a good strategy. It is always important to understand your top priority and what contributes the most to it. If your technical support is stuffed with complaints and questions because, let's say, the app is too slow, it would be very weird to concentrate your efforts on pushing the release of a new viral feature instead of concentrating your team on improving the overall performance of the product.

When technical debt delays features, keeping your product competitive requires balance. Prioritize debt based on impact and risk, integrating small fixes into regular sprints. This keeps the codebase healthy without sacrificing new features. You can also dedicate specific sprints to focus solely on reducing debt, ensuring long-term product stability while still innovating.

Are you turning your team into a feature factory? That might not be the best approach. It’s easy to get caught up in releasing flashy new features, but if your technical support is flooded with complaints—like users frustrated over a slow app—those issues need attention first. Imagine if, instead of chasing viral features, your team focused on what really matters: improving performance and user experience. Addressing core issues will strengthen your product and boost customer satisfaction. Shift your focus. Prioritize what adds the most value and tackle performance problems before rolling out new features.

From my personal experience building up even more technical debt can be far more dangerous for the competitiveness of the product than to delay one or two features in order to regain speed and keep the product's quality up. It all comes down to the communication, product marketing and transparency of feature planning towards the market/customers.