I am the author of this article. In it, I describe the process I set up in my team to reduce technical debt. For context, when you take over an existing team as an external hire, in particular a team that has not had a dedicated manager for a while, you often face an uphill battle. One of the problems I had to tackle was reducing the technical debt of a core engineering team at Zalando. The challenge was to establish a process without being granted a sufficient time budget for technical debt. I originally wrote up my approach for our intranet a couple of months after I set up the new process. Recently, I was offered the opportunity to revise this article for Zalando's public engineering blog. I think it is most relevant for engineering managers working at fast-moving companies.