Are You Actively Identifying and Managing Technical Debt Within Your Product?

As a leader in a scaling startup, you’ve likely heard the term “technical debt” thrown around in meetings. Perhaps you’ve nodded along, knowing it’s something you should be concerned about, but unsure how deeply it affects your business. Or, you may be all too familiar with its impact—sleepless nights, frustrated teams, and slipping deadlines.

Whatever your experience, technical debt is a reality for every growing company. But it’s not just an issue for your engineering team; it’s a problem that has far-reaching implications for your entire business. So, the critical question is: are you actively identifying and managing technical debt within your product?

Understanding Technical Debt

Let’s begin with a clear understanding of what technical debt actually is. Imagine rushing a product feature to market to meet a deadline. You know the code isn't perfect—corners were cut, testing wasn’t thorough, and maybe some quick fixes were implemented to get things working. That accumulation of “unfinished business” in your codebase is technical debt.

In essence, technical debt refers to the future costs of quick-and-dirty development today. Just as financial debt incurs interest, technical debt leads to ongoing costs in the form of slower development, more bugs, and decreased agility. Over time, it can inhibit innovation, frustrate your team, and strain resources.

The Real Costs of Technical Debt

The common misconception is that technical debt is solely a technical issue, something for your developers to deal with. But the reality is much more significant. Left unmanaged, technical debt can cause:

Delayed Product Releases: Your teams spend more time untangling old code than building new features.

Increased Maintenance Costs: You’re constantly patching problems instead of working on long-term solutions.

Inhibited Scalability: The product architecture becomes too rigid to support growth, forcing expensive and disruptive overhauls later.

Damage to Company Culture: Developers and engineers lose morale when they constantly work with problematic code, knowing it’s holding back their productivity.

Ultimately, unchecked technical debt can impede your company's strategic goals. Your tech team is working hard, but progress is slow. You’re throwing more resources at problems, but it’s not yielding the faster results you expected—a phenomenon known as Brooks’s Law. As a CEO or founder, this is where technical debt moves from being an engineering issue to a company-wide business issue.

Why You Need a Strategy for Managing Technical Debt

Every product development project incurs some level of technical debt—it’s almost unavoidable. The key is to manage it strategically, just as you would manage financial debt. You wouldn’t take out a loan without understanding the repayment terms, yet many companies allow technical debt to accumulate without a clear plan for paying it down.

To navigate this, you need a deliberate approach to managing technical debt. Here’s how:

Make It Visible: Like any other business debt, technical debt needs to be visible to your entire team, not just the tech department. You need clear metrics to quantify it—such as the number of bugs, legacy code dependencies, or time spent on maintenance. Regularly reviewing these metrics in leadership meetings ensures that technical debt is part of your ongoing business conversation.

Prioritise Technical Debt in Product Roadmaps: Many companies fail to factor technical debt into their product roadmaps. This is a critical mistake. If you don’t allocate time for paying down technical debt, it will only accumulate and eventually undermine your product. Incorporating time to address technical debt in every sprint helps ensure that you're constantly improving, not just adding more layers to a shaky foundation.

Empower Your Team to Speak Up: Developers often know where the technical debt is hiding but may feel pressure to push forward with new features instead of addressing the existing problems. Create a culture where engineers feel empowered to flag technical debt without fear of being seen as slowing down progress. Make it clear that addressing technical debt is crucial for the company’s long-term success, not just a short-term inconvenience.

Understand the Trade-offs: Sometimes, incurring technical debt is necessary for business reasons. For example, when you’re under pressure to meet a crucial deadline, such as a product launch or investor demo, the faster pace may be worth the longer-term cost. However, these decisions should be made consciously, with a clear plan for how and when you’ll address the resulting debt.

Leverage External Expertise: One of the common issues in scaling startups is a lack of senior technology leadership​. In these cases, bringing in fractional CTO services or external experts can provide the perspective needed to strategically address technical debt. They can help you assess the extent of the problem, prioritise solutions, and ensure alignment between your technology and business goals.

Case Study: Technical Debt in Action

Let’s consider a real-world example. A healthtech startup I worked with was scaling rapidly and had accumulated significant technical debt during its initial product development phase. Their focus had been on getting to market quickly, and while they succeeded in achieving early product-market fit, the pace of development slowed dramatically as the product evolved.

Features that should have taken a few days to implement were dragging out into weeks because of the complexity and fragility of the codebase. Their engineers were spending most of their time firefighting—fixing bugs, addressing performance issues, and trying to keep the product stable. Despite a growing team, productivity was declining.

The company faced a choice: either continue to ignore the technical debt and limp forward, or pause and refactor their codebase. After a careful review, they opted for the latter. It wasn’t an easy decision—the refactoring took several months and slowed the development of new features. But once the technical debt was addressed, the pace of innovation skyrocketed. New features were being delivered faster, with fewer bugs, and the team was far more motivated.

This is a typical story. Ignoring technical debt might seem like the easier option in the short term, but addressing it head-on often leads to faster development cycles and a stronger product down the line.

Identifying Technical Debt in Your Own Product

So, how can you identify technical debt within your own product? Here are some red flags to look for:

Increased Time on Maintenance: If your team is spending more time maintaining the current codebase than developing new features, you likely have technical debt.

Fragile Code: When changes to one part of the product frequently break other parts, this is a sign of underlying issues.

Low Morale in the Engineering Team: Frustration with slow progress, constant firefighting, and repeated bugs can indicate that technical debt is dragging your team down.

Customer Complaints About Performance: If customers are experiencing slow load times, frequent outages, or other performance issues, your technical debt is spilling over into the user experience.

Moving Forward

Managing technical debt requires an ongoing, proactive approach. It’s not just about fixing what’s broken but also about anticipating future needs and ensuring your technology can support your business as it scales. By actively identifying and addressing technical debt, you not only improve your product but also lay the foundation for faster growth, happier teams, and satisfied customers.

In the end, managing technical debt is about balance. You want to move quickly enough to stay competitive, but not so fast that you cripple your product’s future potential. Make technical debt a priority in your strategy, and you’ll ensure your company remains agile, innovative, and ready for whatever comes next.