Maintenance can sound like work that happens after the real work is done. In practice, the way a system is maintained affects what the team can safely build next and what people using it can depend on today.
A small repair can restore trust. A careful upgrade can remove a source of recurring failures. A clear runbook can help someone recover a service without waiting for the one person who remembers how it works.
Maintenance changes what is possible
When a codebase is hard to change, even a modest feature feels risky. People work around old behavior instead of improving it. Over time, those workarounds become part of the system too.
Making the code easier to understand is not separate from product development. It gives future work room to happen. That can mean removing an unused path, documenting an odd constraint, or replacing a brittle dependency. The best choice depends on the problem in front of the team.
Make maintenance visible
If maintenance only happens when something breaks, it is easy to postpone until it becomes urgent. I find it helps to describe the user or team impact plainly: deployments take too long, a dependency is no longer supported, or a routine change requires too much guesswork.
That makes the work easier to prioritize alongside features. It also keeps cleanup from turning into an open-ended search for perfect code. The goal is a concrete improvement someone can notice.
Software keeps changing after release. Treating that ongoing work as part of the product makes it more likely the system will remain useful to the people who rely on it.