I agree with this, the one thing I'll add is that you may also have to contend with the competing priorities of every other VP. Specifically in that Business Development VP may be saying, "We don't have time to do any of those things! We need X done now otherwise we won't get our customer!" And the technical VP response might be, "If we don't fix this now then we won't have _any_ customers." But in the end the financial state of the company will make the decision for you. If you're on the edge and you immediately need more customers to survive then you're going to forgo doing 1 & 2 and instead implement X that BD was requesting. Hoping that you can get enough breathing room in the near future to actually do 1 & 2.