I’m not a huge fan of the financial metaphor for tech debt but this pries apart the core of the problem well from an optionality lens (or as you could also say “rich moves”).

Traditional operations teams and their counterparts in product development thus often end up in conflict, most visibly over how quickly software can be released to production. At their core, the development teams want to launch new features and see them adopted by users. At their core, the ops teams want to make sure the service doesn’t break while they are holding the pager. Because most outages are caused by some kind of change—a new configuration, a new feature launch, or a new type of user traffic—the two teams’ goals are fundamentally in tension.

A culture of celebrating shipping, versus celebrating measurable progress and learnings