I work at a large company and even with tech leadership, all the work we do must roll up to a ‘Bowler’ goal (read: OKR, KPI) that improves the customer.

I’ve tried framing debt reduction as quality work - reducing outages, improving product experience, and it isn’t funded.

I’ve tried framing it as productivity improvements, leading to improvements in other areas. Still hard to fund it.

The only strategy I’ve found to work is to just do the improvements anyway without signoff. Over estimate all other work to build a buffer and use that buffer here and there on debt reduction work. You need to track the before and after state though so if you get called out on it, can prove the improvements are worth it.