If your business truly understood the risk of technical debt, you wouldn’t accept any of it.
There’s a myth that “some level of technical debt is manageable.” But let’s be clear, technical debt is 100% risk. It’s an unhedged fund with no asset securing it, no insurance to mitigate it. The cost isn’t just in future refactoring; it’s in lost time, lost agility, and lost opportunities.
At Microsoft, TFS was delivered on a two-year cycle. By 2012, with 600 engineers, they were shipping just 24 features a year. Technical debt had turned a powerhouse into a bottleneck. It wasn’t until they embraced 3-week Sprints and tackled the underlying debt that they regained agility.
This isn’t just an engineering problem. It’s a business problem. If you think you can hide technical debt in a cost centre forever, think again.
How does your organisation treat technical debt? As a calculated risk or an unrecognised liability?