Well it is exceedingly hard to find good managers IMO. But in general, a product owner does not have to convince the team. Backlog items are not really optional. And if a dev places a technical debt story on the backlog, it will not likely get prioritized by the PO. Until such time that the product manifests systemic problems due to that technical debt. (But by then it is really hard to fix.)
The problem is that the product owner only has half the picture... what customers want. And in the situation where the devs are shielded from the customer, the devs also only have half the picture... the state of the code. So they will eternally be deadlocked into POs wanting features and devs wanting refactoring. But the PO "wins" because they control the backlog. (And here, devs sometimes just mix it in amongst other stories so they don't have to go thru the PO.)
Addressing technical debt has valuable long-term impact. The primary fear of allowing devs to refactor whenever they want is in wasting time by chasing the trends. Here it helps to have someone experienced on the team, because they have already been burned by this. They should be able to weigh the tradeoffs of new tech and guide the team, rather than being blinded by shiny newness.
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Well it is exceedingly hard to find good managers IMO. But in general, a product owner does not have to convince the team. Backlog items are not really optional. And if a dev places a technical debt story on the backlog, it will not likely get prioritized by the PO. Until such time that the product manifests systemic problems due to that technical debt. (But by then it is really hard to fix.)
The problem is that the product owner only has half the picture... what customers want. And in the situation where the devs are shielded from the customer, the devs also only have half the picture... the state of the code. So they will eternally be deadlocked into POs wanting features and devs wanting refactoring. But the PO "wins" because they control the backlog. (And here, devs sometimes just mix it in amongst other stories so they don't have to go thru the PO.)
Addressing technical debt has valuable long-term impact. The primary fear of allowing devs to refactor whenever they want is in wasting time by chasing the trends. Here it helps to have someone experienced on the team, because they have already been burned by this. They should be able to weigh the tradeoffs of new tech and guide the team, rather than being blinded by shiny newness.