Behavioral question
How do you prioritize tech debt against other features?
- Coinbase
- Behavioral
- Medium
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What this question tests
Prioritization judgment: can you weigh tech debt's long-term cost against feature velocity using a concrete decision process, not just 'balance both'.
How to approach it
- State the framing: tech debt isn't free, it has an interest rate (slows future delivery, increases incident risk) that compounds if ignored.
- Propose a rule of thumb: reserve a fixed capacity share (e.g. 15-20%, marked as illustrative) for debt/infra work each sprint rather than debating it ad hoc every time.
- Prioritize which debt to pay down first: debt that's actively blocking velocity or causing incidents, over debt that's merely 'ugly code'.
- Weigh urgency: a customer-facing feature with revenue or competitive deadline pressure can outrank debt work temporarily, but track the debt so it isn't forgotten.
- Use data to make the case: incident frequency, deploy time, or engineer-reported friction tied to specific debt items.
- Revisit the allocation quarterly, since debt priorities shift as the product and team scale.
What a strong answer includes
- Frames tech debt as having a compounding cost, not just an engineering preference, which reframes it as a real business tradeoff.
- Proposes a concrete mechanism (a reserved capacity percentage) instead of an ad hoc case-by-case negotiation every sprint.
- Distinguishes debt causing active harm (incidents, slow deploys) from cosmetic debt, prioritizing the former.
- Uses hard signals like incident count or deploy time to justify debt work to non-technical stakeholders.
Common mistakes
- Treating tech debt vs features as a values debate instead of proposing a concrete allocation mechanism.
- Never actually paying down debt because features always win in the moment, without a protected capacity reservation.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you justify a debt-paydown sprint to a stakeholder who only cares about the roadmap?
- How would you measure whether the debt paydown actually helped?
More behavioral questions
- Describe a complex topic like I'm a high school student. Assume I don't know anything about it.Coinbase · Behavioral · Easy
- Describe a difficult technical concept to me.Coinbase · Behavioral · Easy
- How would you manage a sudden shift in priorities?Coinbase · Behavioral · Easy
- Tell me about a time you had to deal with tech debt. What approach did you take?Coinbase · Behavioral · Easy
- How do you know when to cut corners to get a product out the door?Shopify · Behavioral · Medium
- If there are 3 different items on top priority for a release and the client is insisting on getting all 3 delivered in the same release. As a PM you know there is not enough engineering capacity. What will you do?6sense · Behavioral · Medium
More questions from Coinbase
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 13: Lead the room: staff moves, forward-deployed PM, and the portfolio
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop