The deal [between product owners and] engineering goes like this: Product management takes 20% of the team’s capacity right off the top and gives this to engineering to spend as they see fit. They might use it to rewrite, re-architect, or re-factor problematic parts of the code base...whatever they believe is necessary to avoid ever having to come to the team and say, ‘we need to stop and rewrite [all our code].’ If you’re in really bad shape today, you might need to make this 30% or even more of the resources. However, I get nervous when I find teams that think they can get away with much
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