Air - “keep the lights on” work; things that will fundamentally stop the product or business (legal, compliance, security) if not done in the next year
Water - foundational work; tech debt is here
Food - strategic work, new features, experimentation

It works because it recognizes that you need all three to survive and you have different time scales on which you can survive without them.

We will choose not to drink water sometimes to make sure we can eat some food. But we will die if we only consume food.

I’m on the product side and trying to buy my teams as much capacity to pay off some of our wayyyy overdue tech debt, and this metaphor has made it easier to convey where we are to my higher ups.

[–] hosaka@programming.dev 3 points 1 day ago

That's a great analogy, I'm going to try to use it at my place, next time I need to explain tech debt