Managing Tech Debt

Managing Tech Debt

Help the user manage technical debt strategically using insights from 18 product leaders.

How to Help

When the user asks for help with tech debt:

1. Understand the situation - Ask about the nature of the debt (legacy systems, code quality, architectural limitations), how it's manifesting (slow velocity, incidents, inability to ship), and the business context 2. Diagnose the urgency - Determine if this is blocking critical business needs or a slower-burning issue 3. Choose the right approach - Help them decide between incremental improvement, targeted refactoring, or (rarely) a full rewrite 4. Build the business case - Help quantify the cost of the debt and communicate value to stakeholders

Core Principles

Rewrites almost never work

Camille Fournier: "Engineers notoriously, notoriously, notoriously, massively underestimate the migration time for old system to new system. By the way, you still have to support the old system while you're working on the new system." Full rewrites are traps. Prefer incremental evolution - uplift specific components rather than starting from scratch.

Tech debt is product debt

Ebi Atawodi: "Infrastructure is the product. Period. I cannot build a skyscraper on a shaky foundation. So it is your problem too - it's not for the engineer to be barging on the door." Technical debt should be owned by PMs as "product debt," not treated as an engineering-only concern. Include it in your Top 10 Problems list.

Startups should strategically take on debt

Gaurav Misra: "As a startup your job is to take on technical debt because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company." Debt is leverage - evaluate if a problem can be solved by a future hire rather than today. But monitor the "interest" - if maintenance takes 80-90% of time, you've run out of runway.

Delete code more than you write it

Farhan Thawar: "We have a Delete Code Club. We can almost always find a million-plus lines of code to delete. Everything gets easier - the codebase loads faster, it's easier to understand." Create dedicated time or teams focused solely on removing unused code. Deletion improves velocity and clarity.

Tech debt is visible to users

Matt Mullenweg: "You can see [tech debt] in the interface or how their products integrate with themselves." Fragmented UIs and poor integration between features are user-facing symptoms of accumulated debt. Look for inconsistencies to identify where debt has accumulated.

Quantify the value of paying down debt

Casey Winters: "The most impactful projects are the hardest to measure, so they get chronically underfunded. Build custom metrics to show the value, run small tests that prove the worthwhile-ness of the investment." Create custom metrics and run experiments to demonstrate business value. Align with engineering and design to present a unified front.

Fix bugs immediately, don't backlog them

Geoff Charles: "We don't have a bug backlog. We fix every bug once they're surfaced almost." Assign bugs directly to the engineer on call to ensure immediate pain awareness. Bug backlogs become graveyards.

Debt ceilings innovation

Eeke de Milliano: "Sometimes teams are just getting bogged down by urgent work - too much tech debt, bugs, instability. There's no way they can focus on bigger, creative stuff if they're heads-down dealing with incidents all day." Diagnose when a team is stuck in a "hierarchy of needs" trap. Prioritize debt reduction to free up headspace for creative work.

Tech debt is a champagne problem

Julia Schottenstein: "We would be so lucky to have tech debt because that means people are using the product. What we didn't need at launch was a distributed scheduler - we had no users." Build the simplest, most naive version first. Accept debt as a trade-off for getting product into users' hands.

Plan for dark tunnels

Melanie Perkins: "We thought it would take six months... it took two years of not shipping any product." Major rewrites are "dark tunnels" that stall shipping. If you must do them, gamify the work to maintain team momentum during the long slog.

Design for 1-2 years out

Austin Hay: "Think one to two years down the road about what we're going to need. When setting up tools, ask: 'What happens a year from now if I don't change anything?'" Implement foundational elements like SSO or proper data schemas early to avoid catastrophic migrations later.

Questions to Help Users

• "Is this debt blocking critical business needs, or is it a slower-burning issue?"
• "What percentage of engineering time is going to maintenance vs. new features?"
• "Have you tried to estimate how long a rewrite would actually take? Who made that estimate?"
• "What would happen if you did nothing for another 6 months?"
• "Is there a way to incrementally improve this rather than rewriting?"
• "How would you quantify the cost of this debt to stakeholders?"

Common Mistakes to Flag

• Planning a full rewrite - Rewrites almost never work as planned. They take 2-3x longer than estimated and you must support both systems simultaneously
• Treating tech debt as engineering's problem - This is product debt. PMs should own it alongside engineers
• Letting bug backlogs accumulate - Bug backlogs become graveyards. Fix immediately or decide not to fix at all
• Over-engineering before product-market fit - Debt is a champagne problem. Build naive solutions first and accept debt as the cost of learning
• Not quantifying the cost - Tech debt investments get underfunded because their value isn't measured. Build metrics and run experiments to prove ROI

Deep Dive

For all 20 insights from 18 guests, see references/guest-insights.md

Related Skills

• Technical Roadmaps
• Platform & Infrastructure
• Engineering Culture
• Evaluating Trade-offs

Managing Tech Debt - All Guest Insights

18 guests, 20 mentions

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Adriel Frederick

Adriel Frederick

"The answer was like, Yo, we got to rebuild it. There was no answer where we couldn't have a product like this. We needed some ability to be able to influence prices so that we could actually run an effective marketplace. The current solution didn't work. It wasn't as operationally flexible as we needed it to be."

Insight: When a technical solution lacks the operational flexibility required by the business, a full rebuild is often necessary despite the emotional and resource cost.

Tactical advice:

• Evaluate if current technical debt is preventing necessary operational control.
• Be willing to admit when a complex algorithmic approach has failed and pivot to a more flexible architecture.

Timestamp: 00:32:15

Austin Hay

Austin Hay

"The job of a marketing technologist is to think often one to two years down the road about what we're going to need to solve for and design systems in an elegant way, not to break the bank, but to at least be the minimum viable product to actually get there. And a lot of my job, and I think the job of marketing technologists is trying to preserve that future state in the most minimally invasive engineering and resource way possible."

Insight: Preventing future technical debt requires architecting systems that are 'minimally invasive' today but scalable for needs 1-2 years out.

Tactical advice:

• When setting up tools, ask: 'What happens a year from now if I don't change anything?'
• Implement foundational elements like SSO or proper data schemas early to avoid catastrophic migrations later.

Timestamp: 00:50:07

Camille Fournier

Camille Fournier

"Engineers notoriously, notoriously, notoriously, massively underestimate the migration time for old system to new system and that causes a lot of problems. By the way, you still have to support the old system while you're working on the new system."

Insight: Full system rewrites are often traps because teams underestimate migration time and the burden of supporting two systems simultaneously.

Tactical advice:

• Account for significant migration time when planning system updates
• Plan for the resource cost of supporting the legacy system during a transition

Timestamp: 00:16:24

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"Take pieces potentially of the old system, uplift them, make them more scalable, make them easier to work with, clean up the tech debt, but trying to say we're going to just go away. We're going to rewrite, we're going to build something brand new and it's going to solve all our problems, it just very rarely works."

Insight: Incremental evolution and targeted tech debt cleanup are more successful than 'big bang' rewrites.

Tactical advice:

• Uplift specific APIs or components rather than the whole framework
• Create a staged plan for system evolution

Timestamp: 00:19:14

Casey Winters

Casey Winters

"The idea is that some of the most impactful projects that product teams can work on at scale... are the hardest to measure. And because of that, they just get chronically underfunded... I walk through some examples of a few tactics that work to get around this problem, building custom metrics to show the value, being able to run small tests that prove the worthwhile-ness of the investment."

Insight: Securing investment for non-sexy technical improvements requires quantifying their value through custom metrics and small-scale experiments.

Tactical advice:

• Build custom metrics to demonstrate the business value of performance or stability
• Run small tests to prove that technical investments will yield long-term results
• Align with engineering and design peers to present a unified front for technical investments

Timestamp: 24:49

Dylan Field

Dylan Field 2.0

"You always have to keep in mind tech debt and there might be, when you're moving slow, systematic reasons for that. How do you make sure that you're not grinding to a halt because things are built the wrong way or you rush to get something out, and you need to go and fix the underlying infrastructure or way that you built it in some form?"

Insight: Systematic slowness is often a symptom of technical debt that requires pausing feature work to fix underlying infrastructure.

Tactical advice:

• Investigate systematic reasons for slow development pace
• Balance infrastructure fixes with feature development to maintain long-term speed

Timestamp: 00:11:15

Eeke de Milliano

Eeke de Milliano

"Sometimes teams are just getting bogged down by really urgent work. There's too much tech debt. There's too much product debt. Bugs, instability... There's just no way that they're going to be able to focus on the enlightened, bigger, creative stuff if they're just heads-down dealing with incidents all day."

Insight: Unaddressed tech and product debt acts as a ceiling on a team's ability to innovate.

Tactical advice:

• Diagnose when a team is stuck in a 'hierarchy of needs' trap due to instability
• Prioritize debt reduction to free up headspace for creative work

Timestamp: 00:24:18

Gaurav Misra

Gaurav Misra

"I actually think as a startup your job is to take on technical debt because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company."

Insight: Technical debt is a strategic tool for leverage, allowing startups to move faster by deferring non-critical infrastructure work to future hires.

Tactical advice:

• Evaluate if a problem can be solved by a future hire (e.g., the 500th engineer) rather than solving it today.
• Monitor the 'interest' paid on debt—if maintenance takes up 80-90% of time, you have run out of technical debt runway.
• Dedicate specific periods (like Q4) to paying down accumulated debt when product cycles slow down.

Timestamp: 00:20:31

Geoff Charles

Geoff Charles

"We don't have a bug backlog. We fix every bug once they're surfaced almost."

Insight: Maintain high product quality and velocity by addressing bugs immediately rather than allowing them to accumulate in a backlog.

Tactical advice:

• Assign bugs directly to the engineer on call to ensure immediate pain awareness.
• Use a rotational production engineering program to protect core teams from escalations.

Timestamp: 00:23:13

Julia Schottenstein

Julia Schottenstein

"I try to remind the engineers, we would be so lucky to have tech debt because that means people are using the product... what we didn't need at launch was a distributed scheduler with coworkers and RabbitMQ. We just didn't need it because we had no users."

Insight: Technical debt is a 'champagne problem' that indicates product usage; avoid over-engineering at launch before demand is proven.

Tactical advice:

• Build the simplest, most 'naive' version of a feature first (e.g., a simple for-loop) to validate demand.
• Accept technical debt as a trade-off for getting the product into users' hands faster.

Timestamp: 00:53:02

Keith Coleman & Jay Baxter

Keith Coleman & Jay Baxter

"deleting code is more important than writing it a lot of the time... engineers have a tendency to add these little incremental wins that actually add more of a long-term maintenance cost than is clear... you get forced to do this, by the way, when you have such a small team."

Insight: Small teams must prioritize deleting code over adding features to avoid an unsustainable maintenance burden.

Tactical advice:

• Audit systems regularly to delete 'incremental wins' that have high long-term maintenance costs
• Aggressively remove 'cruft' to keep the core system manageable by a small number of people

Timestamp: 01:03:53

Maggie Crowley

Maggie Crowley

"Where are your technical hurdles? What are the big pieces of tech debt? What are your engineering and technical teams always harping on that they want to invest in?"

Insight: A comprehensive product strategy must account for the technical constraints and maintenance needs identified by engineering.

Tactical advice:

• Interview engineering teams to identify critical technical hurdles
• Include technical debt investments as a core part of the product strategy

Timestamp: 00:37:34

Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg

"Well, that's why I think technical debt is one of the most interesting concepts. There's so many companies as well that maybe have big market caps, but I feel like they might have billions or tens of billions of dollars of technical debt. You can see in the interface or how their products integrate with themselves through things."

Insight: Technical debt is often visible to the end-user through fragmented interfaces and poor product integration.

Tactical advice:

• Identify technical debt by looking for inconsistencies in the user interface and product silos

Timestamp: 00:34:09

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"And it's a big focus for us this year, is actually kind of going back to basics, back to core, and improving all of those kind of nooks and crannies of the user experience, and also ruthlessly editing and cutting as much as possible, because we just launched a lot of stuff over the past 21 years that maybe is not as relevant today or it doesn't need to be there."

Insight: Managing long-term debt requires 'ruthlessly editing' and removing features that are no longer relevant to the core mission.

Tactical advice:

• Perform a 'back to basics' audit to identify and remove features that no longer serve the primary user goal
• Focus on the 'nooks and crannies' of the UX to resolve accumulated friction

Timestamp: 00:34:52

Melanie Perkins

Melanie Perkins

"We were doing a front-end rewrite and we thought it would take about six months... and then it took two years and it was two years of not shipping any product, two years of a product company not being able to ship product."

Insight: Major technical rewrites are 'dark tunnels' that can stall product shipping for years but are necessary for long-term scalability.

Tactical advice:

• Gamify long-term technical projects (e.g., using a game board with rubber ducks) to maintain team momentum during 'dark' periods
• Accept that foundational rewrites are necessary to enable future features like cross-platform collaboration

Timestamp: 00:24:14

Tomer Cohen

Tomer Cohen 2.0

"We have the maintenance agent when you have a failed build, it will do it for you. In fact, I think we're close to 50% of all those builds being done by the maintenance agent and a QA agent."

Insight: AI can significantly reduce engineering 'toil' by automatically diagnosing and fixing failed builds and handling routine QA tasks.

Tactical advice:

• Deploy 'Maintenance Agents' to automatically resolve failed software builds
• Use AI agents to pick up and fix bugs directly from Jira tickets

Timestamp: 00:27:19

Upasna Gautam

Upasna Gautam

"One sprint might be high-priority feature development, in another sprint maybe we're focused on medium-priority optimizations and bug fixes. But we know that any time there's a critical incident in production, it also takes critical priority over everything else."

Insight: Balancing maintenance and new features requires a flexible sprint model that can shift priority based on production stability.

Tactical advice:

• Establish a clear escalation protocol for critical incidents to protect the team's focus
• Rotate sprint focus between new features and optimizations based on current platform health

Timestamp: 27:45

Ebi Atawodi

Ebi Atawodi

"infrastructure is the product. Period. People are like, 'Oh, tech debt.' I'm like, 'Yeah, it's a product debt.' I cannot build a skyscraper on a shaky foundation. So it is your problem too. It's not for the engineer to be barging on the door and be like, 'Oh, there's a problem.'"

Insight: Technical debt should be viewed as 'product debt,' making it a core responsibility of the PM rather than just an engineering concern.

Tactical advice:

• Include infrastructure and tech debt in your 'Top 10 Problems' list
• Treat foundational stability as a prerequisite for building new features

Timestamp: 00:55:22

Farhan Thawar

Farhan Thawar

"We have a Delete Code Club. We can always almost find a million-plus lines of code to delete, which is insane. ... Everything gets easier, right? Codelets loads faster. It's easier to understand."

Insight: Actively incentivize the deletion of redundant code to improve system maintainability, performance, and developer clarity.

Tactical advice:

• Create a 'Delete Code Club' or dedicated hack day teams focused solely on removing code
• Provide a manual or guide for engineers on how to identify and safely delete unused code

Timestamp: 00:48:04

Will Larson

Will Larson

"The decision that was done... they needed to do a complete rewrite in order to get there. This is a decision that never works out for anyone... We try to bring the site up and just keeps crashing. And so it basically takes us a month to get it fully functional again."

Insight: Full system rewrites are extremely high-risk and rarely succeed as intended, often leading to significant downtime and business instability.

Tactical advice:

• Be wary of 'death march' rewrites intended to solve social or architectural problems
• Expect significant debugging periods (e.g., 30 days) when launching major architectural shifts

Timestamp: 01:04:37