Quick Answer:
Effective management of technical debt requires treating it like a financial instrument, not a moral failing. You need a quarterly “debt review” where you explicitly allocate 15-20% of your development capacity to paying down the highest-interest items—the ones actively slowing feature delivery or causing bugs. This isn’t about eliminating all debt; it’s about strategically managing it so it doesn’t bankrupt your project’s velocity.
You know that feeling. The codebase feels heavy. Every new feature takes twice as long as it should, and you’re patching leaks instead of sailing forward. You’ve been told the solution is better management of technical debt, but the advice always sounds vague: “refactor more” or “write better tests.” That’s not a strategy; it’s a wish. After 25 years of building and rescuing software projects, I can tell you the real problem isn’t the existence of debt. It’s how teams think about it. The goal isn’t a pristine codebase. The goal is a codebase that doesn’t actively fight you while you build the business.
Why Most management of technical debt Efforts Fail
Here is what most people get wrong about management of technical debt: they treat it as a cleanup task for slow periods. It becomes the thing you do “if there’s time,” which means it never gets done. The other common failure is the opposite—the grand, all-consuming “rewrite” or “modernization” project that grinds feature work to a halt for six months. Both approaches are bankrupt.
The real issue is not the messy code. It’s the lack of a shared, business-aligned definition of what debt actually costs. When a developer says, “This legacy service is a mess,” a product manager hears an abstract complaint. But when you can say, “Because of this tangled authentication module, adding the new SSO feature will take three weeks instead of one, and it will increase bug risk by 40%,” you’re speaking the language of business impact. You’ve quantified the interest on the debt. Most teams never make that translation. They argue in circles, with engineering feeling unsupported and business feeling slowed down.
I was brought into a mid-sized e-commerce company around 2018. Their platform was a classic PHP monolith, held together by duct tape and hope. The CTO’s plan was a heroic, two-year rewrite in Node.js. They’d already burned eight months and had little to show for it. Morale was in the gutter. I asked one simple question: “What’s the single thing causing the most daily pain for your team and losing you the most money?” It wasn’t the whole monolith. It was the checkout flow—a rat’s nest of code where every change caused a regression, directly impacting revenue. We stopped the rewrite. Instead, we surgically extracted just the checkout service over six weeks, using strangler pattern techniques. Suddenly, the team could innovate on checkout again. The rest of the monolith? We managed it, piece by piece, based on where the pain was. That project didn’t succeed because we eliminated debt. It succeeded because we managed it strategically.
A Framework That Actually Works
Forget about “fixing” technical debt. Your job is to triage it. Here is a system that works in the real world, where deadlines exist and resources are finite.
Define Debt in Terms of Interest
Categorize every piece of known debt by its “interest rate.” High-interest debt is code that changes frequently, is brittle, and is critical to core business functions. A messy CSS architecture for a rarely visited admin page is low-interest. The same mess in your main product UI is high-interest. You pay off the high-interest loans first. This requires honest conversations between tech leads and product owners to map debt to feature roadmaps.
Budget for It, Like a Line Item
You wouldn’t run a household without budgeting for mortgage payments. Don’t run a dev team without budgeting for debt repayment. This is non-negotiable. Dedicate a fixed percentage of every sprint or development cycle—I’ve found 15-20% to be the sustainable sweet spot—exclusively to paying down the high-interest items you’ve identified. This turns debt management from a debate into a standard operating procedure.
The Boy Scout Rule, But With a Twist
You know the rule: leave the code cleaner than you found it. The twist is scope. You can’t refactor the entire module. But you can, and must, clean up the specific function or component you are modifying to deliver your feature. This is how you prevent debt from accumulating as you build. It’s incremental, contextual, and directly tied to value delivery.
Technical debt isn’t your enemy. Unmanaged technical debt is. The difference is a plan, a budget, and the discipline to treat it as a core business function, not an engineering hobby.
— Abdul Vasi, Digital Strategist
Common Approach vs Better Approach
| Aspect | Common Approach | Better Approach |
|---|---|---|
| Planning | “We’ll refactor when this big project is done.” (Spoiler: It’s never done) | Quarterly debt review sessions, prioritizing based on projected “interest” against the upcoming roadmap. |
| Resource Allocation | Using leftover time or dedicating a lone “refactoring sprint” that gets canceled. | Formally allocating 15-20% of all development capacity as a permanent “debt service” budget. |
| Communication | Engineers complain about “bad code.” Business hears “unnecessary work.” | Framing debt in business impact: “This debt adds 3 days to the checkout feature and increases bug risk.” |
| Tooling | Relying on gut feeling and tribal knowledge to identify debt. | Using static analysis tools to track metrics (complexity, duplication) and linking them to JIRA/GitLab issues for visibility. |
| Mindset | Debt is shameful; a sign of past failure. | Debt is a strategic tool. Taking on debt to hit a launch is fine, as long as you have a payment plan. |
Where This Is Heading in 2026
Looking ahead, the management of technical debt is becoming less of an art and more of a data-driven science. First, AI-assisted code analysis is moving beyond spotting style issues. By 2026, tools will predict which modules are likely to become high-interest debt based on change frequency, dependency graphs, and even commit history, allowing for preemptive action.
Second, the rise of Platform Engineering means teams will have internal, self-service tools to automatically apply security patches, dependency updates, and even certain refactorings. This will systematically eliminate whole categories of low-level, tedious debt, freeing teams to focus on higher-value, architectural debt.
Finally, I see a shift in accountability. The conversation is moving from engineering teams justifying “cleanup work” to product and business leaders being measured, in part, on the health of the systems that deliver their outcomes. Technical debt metrics will be a standard part of portfolio reviews, right alongside feature adoption and revenue.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much time should we spend paying down technical debt?
Aim for a consistent 15-20% of your total development capacity. This is sustainable and prevents debt from ballooning. It’s not about a one-time fix; it’s about a constant, manageable payment plan integrated into your workflow.
How do I convince management to invest in technical debt?
Stop talking about code quality. Talk about risk, speed, and cost. Show them data: “Feature X took 4 weeks; with a cleaner codebase, it would have taken 2. This debt is costing us 2 weeks of developer time per major feature.” Translate engineering concerns into business outcomes.
Is it ever okay to take on more technical debt?
Absolutely. It’s a strategic loan. If you need to launch a critical feature to capture a market opportunity, take the debt. The key is to document it immediately and schedule its repayment in your next debt review cycle. Conscious, tracked debt is a tool; unconscious debt is a trap.
How much do you charge compared to agencies?
I charge approximately 1/3 of what traditional agencies charge, with more personalized attention and faster execution. You get direct access to 25 years of strategy and hands-on experience, not a junior consultant learning on your dime.
What’s the first step to getting control of our technical debt?
Schedule a 90-minute “debt inventory” meeting with your lead engineers and product owner. Don’t try to list everything. Just identify the top three pieces of debt causing the most pain right now. Then, commit to addressing one of them in the next two-week sprint. Start small, show value, and build the habit.
Look, no codebase is perfect. The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is velocity and stability. If your technical debt is a silent tax on every single thing you build, you’re not managing it—it’s managing you. Start this quarter. Book that debt review. Allocate that 20%. Frame the first item in terms of business impact. You’ll be surprised how quickly the conversation shifts from blame to strategy. That’s when you start building software that lasts, and teams that don’t burn out.
