Stop Letting Tech Debt Steer Your Roadmap—Take Control Now With 5 Strategies
A Debt Worth Avoiding: Technical debt grows when short-term gains overshadow long-term quality, leading to productivity issues and financial overruns if left unchecked.
Invisible Costs of Coding: Businesses often ignore tech debt because problems aren't visibly broken, but this oversight can consume up to 20% of engineering budgets.
Categories of Chaos: Tech debt comes in many forms, including architectural, code, process, documentation, and infrastructure debts, each impacting stability and scalability.
Fix-It-First Philosophy: Prioritizing tech debt resolution can prevent future fires and ensure smoother rollouts while keeping engineering roadmaps on track.
It always starts small: a skipped code review, a delayed Rails migration, or reallocating engineering resources from maintenance to hit a new feature deadline.
Fast forward a year, and your engineering team is spending a third of their time fighting fires, customer complaints are stacking, and your CFO is staring at a $2 billion budget overrun.
Jeff Watkins, CTO of CreateFuture, has seen the scenario play out time and again: tech debt slowly builds up, starts killing engineering productivity, and eventually spills over into the business.
“Technical debt is inevitable as you scale,” Watkins says, “but businesses are often reluctant to allocate resources to address things that aren’t visibly broken, especially when there’s new functionality to launch.” In the long run, though, this "if it ain't broke, don’t fix it" mentality can eat up to 20% of engineering budgets.
With demand for faster rollouts and scalable systems at an all-time high, delaying fixes today causes bigger fires tomorrow. Here’s how to tackle tech debt strategically without grinding your roadmap to a halt.
What is Technical Debt?
Technical debt is the accumulated cost of rework when speed trumps long-term quality in the development process. It manifests in several distinct forms:
- Architectural debt: When your system architecture can’t keep up with growth or scaling needs.
- Code debt: Low-quality or poorly tested code that creates instability in production, leading to frequent failures.
- Process debt: Inefficiencies in workflows, lack of automated processes, or a broken CI/CD pipeline that creates roadblocks.
- Documentation debt: Missing or outdated documentation, relying on team members with tribal knowledge, and making it harder to troubleshoot and onboard.
- Infrastructure debt: Running on outdated versions of dependencies or neglecting disaster recovery, which can lead to vulnerabilities and system failures.
Causes of Tech Debt
You can’t fix what you don’t understand. Knowing the reason behind your rising tech debt is key to stopping it before it spirals out of control. Here are fundamental causes of technical debt to keep an eye on:
- Growing business pressure: The rush to deliver quickly often causes scope creep, stretched engineering resources, skipped testing, and poorly designed features that have to be fixed later, if at all.
- Outdated system architecture: Sticking with outdated systems and failing to migrate when necessary creates brittle integrations and more technical debt. Aging APIs and authentication systems are often left to stack up with multiple providers.
- Poor development process: Overly lenient or nonexistent code reviews, duplicated code with low readability, and large codebases with 1M+ lines of code (LoC).
- Complexities of legacy systems: Delayed patches, outdated infrastructure, and unsupported versions lead to system incompatibility and snowballing “security debt.” Microsoft is still trying to recover from it. Between the Exchange Online hack and the Midnight Blizzard attack, they are still paying the price for ignoring the debt that built up over time.
- Siloed knowledge management: Poor tech choices, inadequate design pattern implementation, and misuse of frameworks can force teams into overengineering, like adopting microservices without distributed systems expertise.
- Low developer productivity: Devs under constant pressure with no time to review documentation or engage in deep work will always prioritize short-term goals and can cause tech debt to climb.
The most effective technical debt management strategies target these root causes rather than just addressing symptoms.
Need expert help selecting the right tool?
With one-on-one help, we guide you to your top software options. Narrow down your software search & make a confident choice.
5 Steps for CTOs to Reduce Technical Debt
Technical debt is often a conscious decision, especially when the goal is to launch an MVP quickly, with plans to refactor later if it’s successful. It works– until it doesn’t. So, if you’re at that tipping point or want to stay proactive, here are five strategies straight from the CTO’s playbook to tackle that growing tech debt:
1. Make Your Tech Debt Visible
You can’t fix what you can’t measure, but as Martin Riley, CTO at Bridewell, says, you also can’t measure what you can’t see. That means ensuring your development work can be tracked all the way back to the technical debt it creates. With that visibility, you can align engineering investments with business goals, justify refactoring efforts, and avoid surprise system failures. “Knowing who’s responsible for the code that’s creating debt, and if it was signed off, makes it easier to manage.”
Granular visibility into your tech debt starts with solid data. Use an AI agent that connects to your CI/CD pipeline, pulls data from team meetings, and tracks communication patterns, workload distribution, and sprint progress. You can even automate logging to flag outdated or complex code while monitoring how your code quality improves or declines over time. Pair these insights with regular surveys where ICs can rate code modification difficulty, time spent on maintenance, and pain points.
2. Implement a Debt Ledger to Assign Priority
Create a centralized technical debt ledger that logs all forms of debt: code, architectural, and process documentation. But listing sources of tech debt is not enough; the more arduous task is identifying which areas will make the most significant impact. Watkins advises focusing on ROI: “If a fix saves 20 developers an hour a day and only takes a week to implement, that’s an almost immediate return on investment.” He sees similar returns from addressing issues like test instability or long build times.
As you create your debt ledger, follow the 80/20 rule: zeroing in on the 20% of tech debt causing 80% of your pain. Spot the “20%” critical sources by tracking:
- Maintenance time vs. new feature development
- Number of recurring and unresolved bugs
- Developer feedback on the difficulty of changes
- Test coverage percentage
- Build times (10 minutes or longer)
- High rates of code rewrites (more than 20% per sprint)
Quantitative metrics give you the hard facts, but you also need the qualitative side to get a complete picture of how and where your tech debt is building and what parts of the business feel the most heat.
Watkins recommends keeping an eye on user experience issues, longer deployment times, and the biggest one– declining productivity in your dev team. Think of your developers’ deep work hours, CSAT scores from customers complaining about downtime, slow loading times, and flaky builds in production. Make this part of your regular workflow by integrating your ledger with JIRA and assigning a ‘Debt owner’ for each category to stay on top of things.
3. Integrate Technical Debt Into Your Sprint Planning
Jeff Delaney, VP of R&D Engineering at Black Duck, has a smart approach to managing tech debt: Include it in your capacity planning with quarterly goals and a JIRA board. “We make sure to set aside a fixed amount of capacity in every release for tech debt. The amount can vary, but we always know what tech debt we have, we prioritize it, and we give it proper attention.”
Get started with 45-day rotations where developers alternate between maintaining legacy systems and building new features. Pair them up during the switch to enable fresh perspectives and solid knowledge transfer. Working in pairs naturally spreads the maintenance load, gives everyone a deeper understanding of the system, and builds empathy for the less glamorous "maintenance" tasks.
The challenge, however, would be to get buy-in from the C-suite, especially if they see devs working on legacy systems instead of pushing new business goals. Watkins suggests adding remediation time into your dev tickets and adopting a “fix it before you extend it” mindset. “Delivery might slow down initially, but the long-term outcome will deliver on both technical and business objectives.”
4. Build ‘Debt Gates’ in the CI/CD Pipeline
Preventing tech debt is cheaper than cleaning it up down the road– contain it while it’s still benign. Set up an architectural decision record (ADR) program with a standard template to capture alternatives, decision criteria, and the expected tech debt impact. Store it alongside your code in version control. ADRs will help avoid accidental tech debt and guide future refactoring efforts. But ADRs give you a bird’s-eye view.
Real, day-to-day tech debt reduction, however, comes from shipping high-quality code. You can use your AI agent or code analysis tool (if you're not AI-ready yet) to automatically flag issues when certain benchmarks are breached:
- Block deployments when cyclomatic complexity hits 15
- Flag tests as flaky after 3 random failures
- Fail builds if test suites run longer than 10 minutes
- Stop PRs when classes with 500+ lines are up for merge
For dependencies, run custom scripts to block deployments with risky dependencies and prevent merges with conflicting versions. For example, link your script to a CSV security database to automatically block deployments that include vulnerable packages. You can also write scripts to prevent PRs from merging if they create conflicting dependencies or use outdated libraries.
-
Docker
Visit WebsiteThis is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.4.6 -
Pulumi
Visit WebsiteThis is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.4.8 -
GitHub Actions
Visit Website
5. Modernize Your Legacy Infrastructure
Many companies struggle to modernize because they’re stuck with monolithic architectures that slow down agile development and releases. Riley suggests using the Strangler Pattern to tackle tech debt gradually instead of trying to rewrite everything at once.
Rather than a high-risk, all-at-once migration, you modernize your legacy tech incrementally, feature by feature or user group by user group, to reduce disruption and collect feedback along the way.
Some large teams use a parallel run approach like Spotify did for their music player. They kept the web and desktop versions running with the same interface to synchronize data and test the new system before fully migrating.
Play offense on your tech debt!
Break Through Tech Debt Before It Breaks Your Progress
Tech debt isn’t always a bad thing– it’s actually a sign your engineering team is scaling. The better question to ask is: Are you managing it, or is it managing you? As Delaney puts it, “Eventually, the team has to deal with tech debt anyway. The key is doing it on your terms through thoughtful planning, rather than scrambling in crisis mode later.”
Leadership needs to stop waiting for problems to explode and start investing in efficiency, execution, and cost optimization now.
Want to stay in the loop on all things tech debt and leadership? Subscribe to The CTO Club newsletter today.
FAQs
What is technical debt, and why does it matter?
Technical debt is the accumulated cost of rework caused by prioritizing speed over long-term code quality. It manifests as outdated architecture, inefficient processes, bloated code, and missing documentation. Left unchecked, technical debt drains engineering productivity, increases system failures, and inflates budgets by up to 20%.
How do you measure technical debt?
Tracking both quantitative and qualitative metrics is key. Look at maintenance vs. feature development time, recurring bugs, test coverage, build times, and code rewrites per sprint. Also, assess developer deep work hours, CSAT scores related to performance issues, and system downtime trends.
What are the best strategies to reduce technical debt?
Make technical debt visible with AI monitoring. Create a debt ledger with priorities, integrate fixes into sprint planning, enforce CI/CD quality gates, and modernize legacy infrastructure incrementally using the Strangler Pattern. Consistently allocate development capacity to tech debt to prevent fire-fighting later.
