Two Quarters Of Debt Repayment, No Change In Lead Time
Decide what you would do from the brief alone, including whether you would change anything at all. Everything below it is available, but the exercise stops working if you open it first.
A team reserves a fifth of every sprint for technical debt. After two quarters, feature lead time is unchanged. The completed items are real work: a deleted dead module, a test-framework upgrade, a package rename, a configuration cleanup.
Raising the allocation, on the reasoning that a fifth was not enough. It is easy to get agreement on after two quarters of visible effort, it requires no new analysis, and it feels like commitment. It doubles down on a selection process that is choosing the wrong items, because what gets chosen is what an engineer can describe as debt in a planning meeting — which biases hard towards the visible and self-contained and away from the diffuse duplication that is actually charging interest. More capacity aimed at the same list buys more of the same result, and it spends the credibility that made the allocation possible in the first place.
Read this even if you are confident. It is here rather than behind a button because it is the answer most teams actually ship, it passes review, and the cost of it does not arrive until the change after this one.