Navigating technical debt conversations: how to prioritize and get buy-in

technical debt is a constant battle, and getting it prioritized over new features is always an uphill climb. on our team, it often feels like we're constantly fighting fires caused by legacy issues, but when we bring it up, it gets pushed down the roadmap. i'm looking for effective ways to quantify the impact of tech debt – maybe tracking wasted developer time due to cruft, or correlating it with incident frequency and MTTR. has anyone had success proposing a dedicated '20% time' for tech debt? or perhaps bundling debt reduction efforts into feature work in a way that makes it more palatable to product managers? i need some solid strategies to get buy-in.