Maintenance felt like a permanent tax until a small builders pod cleared the backlog. The tax turned out to be a choice.
Maintenance always felt like a tax we just paid. Every team I’ve run carried a backlog of paper-cuts and tech debt that never quite justified a roadmap slot, so it sat there, accruing, making the product feel a little more tired each quarter. The thing I changed recently, and the reason I’m sharing it with y’all, is that “maintenance mode” turned out to be optional.
We took a small group of IC designers and retitled them builders, then paired them tightly with engineers and pointed the whole pod at the backlog instead of new features. Just the long tail of small broken things and the debt nobody wanted to own or had the bandwidth to focus on. Work that would have waited months cleared in a few weeks, and the part of the product that always felt neglected stopped feeling that way.
A couple of things made it work beyond the tooling. First, the retitling mattered more than I expected. Calling them builders, not the maintenance team, framed the work as making rather than mopping up, and people leaned in instead of feeling sidelined. (Worth noting, since I’ve written before that maintenance isn’t a demotion, this is the structural version of that belief.) Second, the pairing was tight enough that the design intent and the build happened in the same loop, so there was no handoff gap where small fixes go to die.
Maintenance mode turned out to be optional, which means I’d been choosing to pay for it without noticing.
What I’d flag for anyone trying this is that the trap is treating it as a place to park people. It only works if the builders have real ownership of the outcome and the backlog is genuinely theirs to clear, not a holding pen between ‘real’ projects. Done that way, the permanent tax I’d just accepted for years turned out to be a choice I’d been making without realizing it.
The teachable part
Maintenance only feels permanent because we treat it that way. Give a few builders real ownership of the backlog and the tax you’d accepted can disappear.