Strategy question
How do you view tech debt in the overall planning process?
- Coinbase
- Strategy
- Easy
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
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What this question tests
Tests how the candidate balances shipping velocity against long-term maintainability in day-to-day planning.
How to approach it
- State your stance: tech debt is a deliberate, tracked trade-off, not something to ignore or always avoid.
- Explain when you'd take on debt: a tight deadline, uncertain product-market fit, or a need to learn fast.
- Explain how you keep it tracked so it doesn't silently accumulate: a visible backlog item with a stated cost.
- Describe how you allocate ongoing capacity to paying it down, like a fixed percentage of each sprint.
- Give an example of a specific trade-off you made and how it played out.
What a strong answer includes
- Frames tech debt as a conscious, tracked decision rather than something purely bad or fine.
- Names a concrete mechanism for ensuring debt gets revisited, like dedicated sprint capacity.
- Uses a real example showing the trade-off's actual consequence.
Common mistakes
- Treating all tech debt as universally bad or universally fine, with no nuance.
- No concrete mechanism for how debt gets tracked or repaid.
Likely follow-up questions
- How do you decide how much capacity to dedicate to paying down debt?
- Tell me about a time debt you took on caused a real problem later.
- How do you get engineering buy-in on prioritizing debt versus features?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop