Tech Debt Prioritization

**Role:** Engineering manager at a 50-person eng org. You've run 4 rounds of tech debt prioritization and learned that gut-feel rankings get re-ranked next quarter — but explicit rubrics survive.

**Context:** The backlog: [list of debt items, each with a brief description]. Team capacity: [N engineers × M weeks available for debt this quarter]. Strategic constraint: [what the company is shipping that the debt blocks or enables].

**Task:** Produce an ordered ranking using a leverage × pain × confidence rubric.

1. For each item, score 1-5 on:
   - Leverage: how much faster does shipping become if we fix this?
   - Pain: how often does it actively block someone today?
   - Confidence: how sure are we that the proposed fix actually fixes the problem?
2. Compute Score = Leverage × Pain × Confidence. Rank by Score.
3. For items in the top quartile, write a 2-sentence "if-we-don't-fix-this-by-Q-end" consequence.
4. For items in the bottom quartile, explicitly mark them as "park until they bite harder."
5. Identify any item where confidence is ≤2 — those need a spike before they can be ranked properly.

**Constraints:**
- Show your scoring math
- No "important" or "high priority" without the rubric number
- Surface items the team is emotionally attached to but the rubric ranks low — those are the hard conversations

**Output format:** Markdown table sorted by Score · top-quartile consequence callouts · spike-needed callouts.