Is Technical Debt Considered and Prioritised in Your Product Development Planning?

In the relentless world of startups and scaling SMEs, product development often feels like a race against time. The demands of delivering new features, keeping pace with competitors, and satisfying customers can create an overwhelming sense of urgency. Amidst this frenzy, there’s one crucial element that often gets swept under the rug—technical debt.

So, is technical debt adequately considered and prioritised in your product development planning? And if not, what are the consequences for your business?

What is Technical Debt?

Technical debt refers to the future cost incurred when you take shortcuts in development to achieve faster results today. Imagine cutting corners to meet a deadline, knowing that the choices you make now will require extra work to fix later. It might involve choosing a quick, less-than-ideal solution or failing to address underlying architectural issues.

In the short term, these compromises can help you launch features faster. But over time, the accumulated debt can slow down development, increase maintenance costs, and even undermine your ability to innovate. If left unchecked, technical debt can cripple your ability to scale effectively, putting the brakes on your growth.

The Problem of Ignoring Technical Debt

In many early-stage companies, technical debt is treated as an afterthought. There’s a focus on delivering features, entering new markets, and satisfying investor expectations. Technical debt is seen as something to address “later,” when the business has more time, resources, or perhaps a full-time CTO.

However, postponing technical debt is a dangerous gamble. The longer you wait to address it, the more it compounds, becoming harder and more expensive to fix. Worse, it can lead to system failures, security vulnerabilities, and missed market opportunities. In regulated industries like fintech and healthtech, this oversight can also result in costly compliance issues​​.

The Strategic Risk of Misalignment

One of the most significant risks for startups is the misalignment between technology development and business goals. When scaling quickly, technology can become decoupled from the overall strategic objectives of the business. This decoupling often leads to resource misallocation, projects that don’t deliver ROI, and missed opportunities​. Technical debt plays a central role in this misalignment.

Imagine an eCommerce startup prioritising rapid feature rollouts to attract users. They build new functionalities hastily, without considering the long-term implications for their architecture. As technical debt builds, the system becomes harder to maintain, new features take longer to implement, and the cost of scaling the platform increases. Instead of technology enabling business growth, it becomes a bottleneck. By failing to manage technical debt, the company risks falling behind its competitors, eroding its value proposition and market share.

Understanding the True Cost

Technical debt isn’t just about messy code or outdated frameworks—it’s about the operational and financial cost to your business. Here are a few ways technical debt can hurt your company:

Slower Development Cycles: As technical debt increases, so does the complexity of your codebase. This slows down future development, as engineers spend more time navigating and fixing existing issues rather than building new features.

Increased Maintenance Costs: Technical debt often leads to higher maintenance costs. Teams are required to spend a disproportionate amount of time fixing bugs or ensuring that legacy systems integrate with newer technologies.

Poor Team Morale: When development teams are constantly bogged down by technical debt, morale suffers. Developers want to build new, exciting products, but technical debt forces them to deal with frustrating, repetitive tasks instead.

Reduced Flexibility: If your system is overloaded with technical debt, it becomes harder to pivot or introduce new innovations. This lack of agility can be a significant disadvantage in a fast-moving market.

Balancing Innovation with Maintenance

One of the most significant challenges scaling companies face is balancing the need for innovation with the reality of maintaining their systems. Startups and SMEs are often under pressure to push new features, with the belief that innovation is the key to growth. However, this focus on constant innovation often comes at the cost of system health.

Companies need to adopt a more balanced approach, one that recognises the importance of both innovation and maintenance. Product roadmaps should not just reflect what’s new and exciting; they should also include time for addressing technical debt and system improvements. A well-rounded product roadmap is critical to guiding development efforts, setting stakeholder expectations, and ensuring resources are allocated efficiently​.

Prioritising Technical Debt

To effectively manage technical debt, it’s essential to acknowledge it as a key component of your product development strategy. Here are some ways to prioritise technical debt in your planning:

Assess Debt Regularly: Make a habit of regularly assessing your technical debt. This includes both identifying areas of concern and understanding the impact of that debt on your development cycles.

Create a Debt Payoff Plan: Much like financial debt, technical debt should be tackled with a payoff plan. Prioritise high-interest debt (those issues that cause the most disruption or risk) and work to systematically reduce it over time.

Allocate Resources for Debt Reduction: Budget time and resources specifically for addressing technical debt. This should be part of your ongoing development efforts rather than something that’s tackled only in emergency situations.

Monitor Technical Health: Use metrics to monitor the health of your codebase. Tools that measure code complexity, test coverage, and system performance can provide valuable insights into where your debt is accumulating.

Educate Stakeholders: Often, non-technical stakeholders view technical debt as an unnecessary burden. Help them understand the long-term impact of ignoring debt, and ensure they see debt reduction as an investment in the company’s future scalability and success.

Incorporate Debt into Decision-Making: When making decisions about new features or updates, consider how they will impact your technical debt. Strive to balance the benefits of new development with the cost of accumulating more debt.

Case Study: The Cost of Neglecting Debt

Consider the story of a mid-stage SaaS company I worked with. They were expanding rapidly, adding new features and onboarding customers at a rate that strained their systems. Unfortunately, they had neglected technical debt for too long. Their core system was built on a shaky foundation—an outdated framework that was never fully optimised.

Initially, the team ignored the problem, focusing instead on delivering features that investors and customers were asking for. But as the system aged, it became more fragile. New features took longer to build, bugs increased, and outages became more frequent. In the end, they were forced to halt new feature development for six months while they overhauled the system. The cost? Hundreds of thousands of pounds in lost revenue and a significant blow to their reputation.

The lesson here is clear: ignoring technical debt is not a sustainable strategy. Eventually, it will catch up to you, often at a cost far higher than if you had addressed it earlier.

The Role of Leadership

Leadership plays a crucial role in how technical debt is perceived and prioritised within an organisation. In many startups, the absence of senior technology leadership means that technical debt is often overlooked or deprioritised​​. This is a critical mistake. A lack of leadership in this area can lead to long-term issues that erode the company’s technological foundation.

Fractional CTOs or other external advisors can help fill this gap by bringing an experienced, strategic perspective to the table. They can ensure that technical debt is not only acknowledged but actively managed in a way that aligns with the company’s long-term business goals​.

Conclusion: Building for the Future

Technical debt isn’t inherently bad—it’s often a necessary byproduct of the rapid development that characterises early-stage companies. However, like financial debt, it needs to be managed thoughtfully and strategically.

By recognising technical debt as a vital aspect of your product development planning, you can ensure that it remains under control, allowing your company to scale effectively without sacrificing quality, agility, or innovation. Prioritising debt reduction alongside feature development will create a healthier, more sustainable technology infrastructure that supports long-term growth and success.

In the end, managing technical debt is about building for the future. The choices you make today will determine your company’s ability to innovate, scale, and thrive tomorrow.