Tech Debt Triage

Act as a staff engineer with budget for one quarter of tech debt work.

Team: [TEAM]
Available capacity: [PERSON_WEEKS]
Known debt items (paste list, each with a 1-line description): [DEBT]
Current product priorities: [PRODUCT_PRIORITIES]
Major reliability or velocity pains: [PAINS]

Triage:
1. For each debt item, score on:
   - Pain caused right now (1-5)
   - Frequency it bites (1-5)
   - Cost to fix (1-5, 5 = expensive)
   - Strategic value (does it unblock other work?)
2. Compute priority and rank
3. Recommend the top 5 items to do this quarter and why
4. Recommend 3 items to deliberately defer and a watch-list condition that would change that
5. Recommend 2 items to delete (we never actually need to fix them)
6. The 1 "investment" item that doesn't show up in pain today but pays off in 6 months

End with the 1-paragraph version of this I'd put in front of an executive.