[nradov]

In most organizations the engineering manager would share that prioritization responsibility with a product manager who acts as the voice of the customer. One simple approach is to just divide team capacity into two buckets: 80% for new features and customer bug fixes, 20% for tech debt. The specific percentages can vary based on circumstances.

[pc86]

"Some portion of your time is reserved to work on whatever you want to work on with no input from outside your small team" does not work long term and it does not work at scale.

Even among engineering software is somewhat unique in that we intentionally make sub-optimal decisions and then expect other departments not to raise an eyebrow when we demand time away from the next set of features to address (some of) those decisions, usually introducing more sub-optimal decisions in the meantime.

Nobody has figured out a better way to do it but it's easy to see why non-technical people would be inclined to think tech debt is just a way to do less "real work."

[nradov]

Nah. I've seen that kind of capacity allocation work just fine on large teams and programs. It's not "whatever you want", the tech debt payments still have to be justified with escalating levels of approval required depending on effort and risk.