Last year I transitioned to the role of engineering manager on a complex, legacy service with a poor reliability record. As a first-time manager I found it challenging to plan a roadmap that can balance tackling reliability issues and reducing technical debt on one hand, and building new features on the other.

Developer time is a very precious resource. As a manager, you want to spend it in a way that produces compounding benefits over time. So I came up with some guiding principles to help me prioritize work in a way that keeps the system running, with hopefully fewer hiccups over time.