How to Get Tech-Debt on the Roadmap

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Prioritization of Engineering Work

The engineering team faces numerous potential projects and must prioritize based on their impact on the business.
Product managers use tools and frameworks to evaluate projects based on potential impact, return on investment (ROI), and user sentiment.
Prioritization should consider both the ROI and the cost of the work, viewing tech debt as part of the business context rather than a separate category.
Engineers play a crucial role in translating business requirements into technical solutions and understanding the impact of changes on the system.
A clear business case helps gain support and prioritization for engineering work, ensuring alignment with organizational goals.

To prioritize tech debt work, understand its business value and translate it into impact-based terms rather than technical changes.
Use data from SLOs, metrics, chaos experiments, incidents, and qualitative surveys to back up arguments and make a business case.
Consider the impact on revenue, customer experience, and operational efficiency when prioritizing tech debt work.
Address technical debt to ensure service scalability and reliability, prioritizing projects based on their impact on business goals and sales targets.
Use data and metrics to support the business case for technical debt reduction.
Communicate security concerns in the language of business impact using frameworks, agreements, and risk analysis to assess and prioritize security-related technical debt.
Frame the benefits of tech debt projects that primarily benefit engineering velocity in terms of freeing up resources for more impactful work.

Break down toil tasks into smaller, incremental improvements.
Start with simple solutions and gradually build upon them.
Use qualitative surveys with on-call engineers to gather feedback and identify common toil-related issues.
Analyze the data to prioritize improvements and reduce wasted engineering time.