The company you work for employes professional development engineers

It is the responsibility of these engineers to comply with this policy while meeting your deliverables. Your Product Owners cannot tell you to ‘not work on refactoring’. It is their responsibility to explain the priority order of capabilities, it is your job as developers to decide how to deliver.

You must not accept long term technical debt. It is hardly ever wise to accept short term technical debt ‘just for one sprint’. This will lead to an inevitable tension between software developers and product owners. If this causes you problems consult your management.

If the software you are working on is not compliant with this policy (i.e. contains long term technical debt) you must follow the boy scout code and leave it better than when you arrived.

You are deemed to have engineering judgement. Use it. Do not accept long term technical debt, but don’t try and ‘boil the ocean’.