Operational maintenance and technical debt should be tracked as a distinct, always-funded bucket, separate from whichever strategic bets the org has chosen as its focus. Keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) work and tech debt paydown continue regardless of which focus areas win the quarter's strategy debate — they are not one of the competing bets, they are the baseline cost of keeping the product running.
Practically, this means tracking the percentage of team time spent on KTLO work as its own metric, and never letting the strategic-focus conversation implicitly starve it. Keeping the two buckets separate is also what protects the WIP cap on strategic bets from being quietly violated — KTLO is real work but it isn't a bet, so it doesn't count against the two-or-three-bet limit.
Regulatory and compliance response is a recurring example of work that should be planned for as keep-the-lights-on capacity rather than treated as a strategic emergency each time it lands: "you're a bank — like, why is a request from a regulator always a panic? You haven't strategically understood that to be a bank you need to respond to regulatory requests and changes in compliance." Failing to carve out this category ahead of time forces it to compete for the same capacity as the chosen strategic bets.