I had a conversation with a friend today who is fairly new to engineering management, and struggling with the usual set of problems. One thing he mentioned in particular was "it's hard for me to make space in our delivery cycle for us to deliver technical improvements".

I'm not an expert here by any means, but I think we do this pretty well at CarbonRe.

There are three sub-problems here: who gets to decide what work is delivered, how do we define technical work in the first place, and how do we effectively prioritise when there's too much stuff to do.