[trunnell]

A "culture of approvals" is one root cause of this situation. Something needs to be done, but instead of doing it an engineer asks someone else for approval and doesn't receive it. Healthy teams don't work that way.

In a healthy team, engineers are responsible for the health of the system.

In a healthy team, engineers make decisions about non-product-feature related work, including tech debt. Product managers decide the relative priority of product changes. Engineering managers (who must be just as technical as the engineers on their team) make schedule decisions, balancing the health of the code base and the product needs.