Before I, an engineer, believe you, an engineer

that “pressure from product and business made us produce this mess in the code” I need to see how tight your feedback loops are.

Because, my experience also tells me that looking at how teams that complain that the pressure from product/business causes the cruft they piled up work, I often conclude that if they were instead given an infinite amount of time they would end up producing very similar if not the same solutions.

I’d say that that’s then (more of) an engineering culture and skills problem rather than a pressure problem.

Investing in skills that keep codebases cheap to change and minimize the amount of rework, khm XP practices khm, will also, as a byproduct, help you with building more productive relationships with your business and product partners.