Work continues after release
A product can carry little visible code debt and still be difficult to run. An engineer may be the only person who knows how to repair an import. A release may need an undocumented sequence. A customer exception may be resolved manually every month.
These arrangements consume time and concentrate risk. We think of them as support debt: recurring operating effort that the product has not yet absorbed into a reliable process.
Record the interruptions
Start with what reaches the support desk. Group recurring incidents by cause and capture the work required to resolve them. Avoid treating the number of tickets as a complete measure; a rare incident can carry a much greater consequence than a frequent minor query.
Ask which tasks depend on memory, privileged access or the availability of one person. Those dependencies often identify the most valuable documentation and tooling work.
Invest where the pattern repeats
A clear error message may prevent a class of requests. A reconciliation tool may replace hours of manual comparison. A tested runbook may allow a wider team to respond safely. Engineering improvement is not limited to new customer features.
Give this work explicit priority against the roadmap. Otherwise the same interruptions will continue to consume capacity while appearing to be unavoidable overhead.
Give the responsibility a home
Support debt needs an owner and a review cadence. An annual technical health review can connect incident patterns, dependency maintenance and the next set of engineering priorities.