Technical debt is killing your velocity.
But here’s the thing: everyone talks about technical debt like it’s just messy code. It’s not. The real costs hide in places you’re not looking. After 15 years helping companies dig out from under crushing technical debt, I’ve seen patterns. The same expensive mistakes.
Let’s talk about what technical debt actually costs you. And more importantly, when you should pay it down versus when you should let it ride.
The Real Cost Isn’t Where You Think
Most CTOs focus on the obvious stuff like spaghetti code, missing tests, and poor documentation.
Sure, those matter.
But the expensive debt? It’s elsewhere. Those architecture decisions that made sense three years ago are now strangling you. That “temporary” third-party service became permanent. Your database schema designed for 100 users now serves 100,000.
The most expensive technical debt often hides in deployment processes. When every change requires a 45-minute deployment, velocity dies. Testing in production becomes impossible. Quick fixes don’t exist.
The debt isn’t in the code. It’s in the deployment architecture.
How to Actually Identify Technical Debt
Stop looking at code coverage metrics. Start looking at developer behavior.
Where do developers avoid making changes? That’s debt.
What takes 10x longer than it should? That’s debt.
What breaks when you change something unrelated? That’s debt.
My Framework for Identifying the Expensive Stuff
The Velocity Test: Track how long similar features take to build over time. If your two-week features are becoming four-week features, you’ve found debt.
The New Developer Test: How long until a new developer can ship their first feature? More than two weeks? You have architectural debt.
The Midnight Test: What breaks at 2 AM? What can’t you fix without a full deployment? That’s operational debt.
The Customer Test: What customer complaints keep coming back? Performance issues? Data inconsistencies? That’s quality debt.
Common example: APIs returning search results in 8+ seconds. The code might be clean. Beautiful, even. But database queries without proper indexes? One afternoon of adding indexes can cut response time to 200ms. That’s the debt that matters.
Quantifying the Unquantifiable
“Technical debt” sounds abstract, so you need to make it concrete.
Put numbers on it.
Every piece of technical debt has a cost. Calculate it:
Developer Time Cost: (Extra hours per task) × (Developer hourly rate) × (Tasks per month)
Opportunity Cost: Features you can’t build because you’re fighting fires
Customer Cost: Churn rate from performance issues × Customer lifetime value
Hiring Cost: How much harder is it to hire when developers hear about your tech stack?
Take authentication system debt. The old system works fine, but every new feature needs custom authentication logic.
The math:
- 3 extra days per feature involving auth
- 8 features per month needed auth
- $250/day contractor rate ($5k/month ÷ 20 working days)
- = $6,000/month in extra development cost
Suddenly, that four-week rewrite doesn’t look so expensive.
Strategic Approaches to Managing It
Not all debt should be paid immediately.
Some should never be paid.
Here’s how I think about it:
Pay It Now When:
- It blocks every new feature
- It’s causing customer churn
- It makes the system unstable
- The interest compounds (gets worse over time)
- It blocks your ability to scale
Pay It Later When:
- It’s isolated to one area
- It’s annoying but not blocking
- You’re about to replace that system anyway
- The business might pivot
- You have bigger fires
Never Pay It When:
- That code rarely changes
- It works and doesn’t impact anything else
- The entire feature might get sunset
- The cost to fix exceeds the lifetime cost of living with it
When to Pay It Down vs Live With It
The decision isn’t technical - it’s economic.
Calculate the interest rate on your debt:
- How much extra does this cost per month?
- Is that cost increasing or stable?
- What’s the total cost to fix?
- What’s the opportunity cost of fixing it?
If fixing costs $100k and saves $5k/month, that’s a 20-month payback. Can your business afford to wait 20 months for ROI? Maybe. Maybe not.
But if that $5k/month is growing 10% monthly? Fix it now. Compound interest is brutal.
The Tactical Approach
You can’t stop everything to pay down debt. The business must move forward.
Use the 70/20/10 rule:
- 70% new features
- 20% paying down debt
- 10% exploration and learning
Every sprint, tackle one piece of debt. Not the biggest. Not the most annoying. The one with the best ROI.
Make it systematic:
- Keep a debt register (like a risk register)
- Review it monthly
- Calculate ROI for each item
- Pick the top ROI item that fits in your 20% budget
- Fix it completely (half-fixed is often worse than not fixed)
Strategic Debt Can Be Good
Here’s what nobody tells you: some technical debt is strategic.
If you launched a feature with hardcoded values, good - at least you shipped.
Built a monolith instead of microservices? Smart. You avoided premature optimization.
Used a simple database schema? Perfect. You didn’t over-engineer.
The problem isn’t taking on debt. It’s not knowing you’re taking it on. Or forgetting to pay it back.
Document your debt decisions:
- What shortcut did you take?
- Why was it the right choice then?
- When should you revisit it?
- What signals indicate it’s time to pay it back?
The Reality Check
After 15+ years in this industry, here’s what I know:
Perfect code doesn’t exist, and every system has debt.
The best teams don’t avoid debt. They manage it strategically. They know what debt they have. They know what it costs. They make conscious decisions about when to pay it down.
Your job isn’t to eliminate technical debt. It’s to keep it at a level where it doesn’t kill your business.
Because at the end of the day, dead companies don’t have technical debt - they’re just dead.
Focus on the debt that matters. Ignore the debt that doesn’t. And always, always know the difference.
That’s how you build systems that last. And businesses that thrive.
Need help figuring out which debt is killing your velocity? Let’s talk.