But the GP is essentially correct - there is a 2% of salesforce that could be built run and keep 80% of salesforce users happy. Except that you could not charge enough to be able to advertise on F1 cars and take SVPs out to dinner.
So you could not actually make 80% of them happy - they would ever buy it.
Yes, you largely do - they’re the commits that get rushed to, and through.
This take that showstopping technical debt is unavoidable is very new, and will age like milk.
No it's not. The push and pull between shipping and paying down technical debt is as old as there's been software to sell. Sales has been selling features that don't exist quite yet ever since they've been talking to customers, and engineering has been pushing back on implementing them yesterday since there's been features to implement. Showstopping technical debt is merely a side effect of who wins that argument in a given org.
My point is the technical debt is stopping the show way more often.
Not “this never existed before selling”,
but “we never had the team in place who could do this right in the first place”.
You can quibble about who is responsible, but the fact remains.
I think that the best you can hope for is a CI process that verifies a minimum quality standard. There are I am sure plenty of CI funnels that measure cyclometric complexity, but “rewrite this because it works but is over complex” is a hard sell, compared to “we need to rethink the whole architecture, give me three months”