Every engineering team has technical debt. The question isn’t whether you have it—it’s whether you’re managing it intentionally or letting it manage you.
I’ve seen teams paralyzed by debt, afraid to touch anything. I’ve also seen teams ignore it until their velocity dropped to near-zero. Both approaches fail. The right answer lies in treating technical debt as a first-class engineering concern with measurable costs and benefits.
What Technical Debt Actually Costs You
Most teams think about tech debt in vague terms: “it slows us down.” That’s not actionable. Here’s what technical debt actually costs:
1. Developer Time
Every workaround, every “I’ll fix this later,” every undocumented system behavior costs time. Not just once—every time someone touches that code.
How to measure it: Track time spent on incidents related to known issues. Ask developers: “How much time this sprint was spent working around known problems vs. building new features?“
2. Cognitive Load
Complex, tangled systems exhaust your team. They have to hold more context in their heads, which means slower onboarding, more mistakes, and higher burnout.
How to measure it: Track onboarding time to productivity. If it used to take 2 weeks for a new engineer to ship their first PR and now it takes 6, that’s a signal.
3. Opportunity Cost
Every hour spent fighting fires or working around problems is an hour not spent on features that matter to your business.
How to measure it: Compare your planned vs. actual velocity over time. A consistent gap indicates systemic drag.
The Prioritization Framework
Not all technical debt is equal. Here’s how I recommend categorizing and prioritizing:
Tier 1: Blocking Debt
Debt that prevents you from doing something you need to do. Examples:
- Security vulnerabilities that must be fixed for compliance
- Performance issues causing customer churn
- Architecture that can’t scale to meet known demand
Action: Fix immediately. These aren’t trade-offs—they’re existential risks.
Tier 2: Friction Debt
Debt that makes everything 20-30% slower. Examples:
- Slow CI/CD pipelines
- Lack of type safety causing runtime errors
- Missing observability making debugging hard
Action: Budget 15-20% of each sprint for systematic improvement. Not as “spare time”—as committed work.
Tier 3: Cosmetic Debt
Debt that bothers engineers but doesn’t measurably impact delivery. Examples:
- Outdated libraries with no security implications
- Code style inconsistencies
- That one microservice everyone thinks should be rewritten
Action: Only address when you’re already in the area for other work. Don’t chase perfection.
Making It Stick
The framework only works if you actually use it. Here’s how:
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Create a debt registry. Track known debt items with estimated impact and fix cost. Review monthly.
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Make it visible. Include debt metrics in your sprint retrospectives. When someone asks why velocity is down, point to the data.
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Protect the time. If you commit to 20% debt reduction, protect it like you’d protect a customer commitment. It’s not optional.
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Celebrate wins. When you pay down debt that measurably improves something, share it. “We reduced build time by 40%” is a win worth recognizing.
The Bottom Line
Technical debt isn’t a moral failing—it’s a strategic choice. Sometimes taking on debt makes sense. The key is being intentional about it.
Track it. Measure it. Pay it down systematically. Your future self—and your team—will thank you.
Want help assessing your team’s technical debt situation? Book a discovery call to discuss an architecture review.