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How do you balance the priorities of developing new features and managing technical debt?

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Anonymous

4.2Exceptional
During planning there are 3 buckets of workstreams I pay attention to - 
1. KTLO bucket which consists of team oncall ie. sev remediation & sev reports, sev corrective actions and tech debt projects 
2. Platform or core foundation investments 
3. Product features 

If our systems are relatively stable the KTLO bucket gets 25-30% allocation. For tech debt projects I meet with the tech leads every quarter to understand the importance of any of of the tech debt accumulation and prioritize them into different levels based on urgency, effort, business impact etc. If there are more P0s there then the allocation looks more like 40%. Some projects that have come under this are increasing integration test coverage, improved monitoring and system generated alerts, dead code cleanup etc. 

Anonymous

3.6Strong
Technical debt is inevitable part of devleopment process, At Auctane, I had a buffer of 10-15% of sprint cycle to address any technicl debt. I had maintained two buckets - tech debt and the other feature buckets - All low hanging tech debt was a valuable tool for new comers to team, during shipping season we would actively stop working on new features- these were dedeciated to tech debt for the team. For e.g. there were many stored proc with dead code - this caused lot of issues to debug - etc we identified these are candidates to refactor and improve - we took this in small increments and chip away at the tech debt.  By actively addressing the tech debt while working on new features - I could manage the tech debt.
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Interview question asked to Engineering Managers interviewing at Mindtree, Support.com, Rapid7 and others: How do you balance the priorities of developing new features and managing technical debt?.