We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed 189 bugs

I firmly believe that this sort of fixit week is as much of an anti-pattern as all-features-all-the-time. Ensuring engineers have the agency and the space to fix things and refactor as part of the normal process pays serious dividends in the long run.

eg: My last company's system was layer after layer built on top of the semi-technical founder's MVP. The total focus on features meant engineers worked solo most of the time and gave them few opportunities to coordinate and standardize. The result was a mess. Logic smeared across every layer, modules or microservices with overlapping responsibilities writing to the same tables and columns. Mass logging all at the error or info level. It was difficult to understand, harder to trace, and nearly every new feature started off with "well first we need to get out of this corner we find ourselves painted into".

When I compare that experience with some other environments I've been in where engineering had more autonomy at the day-to-day level, it's clear to me that this company should have been able to move at least as quickly with half the engineers if they were given the space to coordinate ahead of a new feature and occasionally take the time to refactor things that got spaghettified over time.