What Technical Debt Actually Means for Non-Technical Founders
Technical debt isn't just developer jargon. Learn what causes it, when it's acceptable, and how to prevent it from slowing down your startup.
September 14, 2024 11 min read
# What "Technical Debt" Actually Means for Non-Technical Founders
Slug: what-technical-debt-actually-means
Date: 2024-05-30
Tag: Software Development
Meta Description: Technical debt isn't just developer jargon. Learn what causes it, when it's acceptable, and how to prevent it from slowing down your startup.
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Your development team keeps mentioning "technical debt" when you ask why features take longer than expected. They say you've "accumulated debt" and need to "pay it down." You nod, but the metaphor doesn't quite land.
Technical debt is real, and it directly affects how fast your product can evolve. Understanding it helps you make better decisions about when to cut corners, when to invest in quality, and how to evaluate your development team's work.
This guide explains technical debt in business terms. No coding knowledge required.
The Concept in Plain Language
Technical debt is the gap between how your software is built and how it should be built.
The financial metaphor works: when you take shortcuts to ship faster, you're borrowing time from the future. Like financial debt, this creates interest—future work takes longer because of those shortcuts.
Unlike financial debt, technical debt isn't tracked on a balance sheet. It accumulates invisibly until it manifests as slow development, frequent bugs, or systems that can't handle new requirements.
Some examples:
Copy-pasted code. A developer copies a block of code instead of creating a reusable function. This ships faster today. But when you need to change that logic, you have to find and update every copy. If you miss one, bugs appear.
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Hardcoded values. Instead of building a proper settings system, values are embedded directly in the code. The feature works, but changing any setting requires a developer to modify code and deploy—rather than simply updating a configuration.
Skipped testing. Writing tests takes time. Skipping them gets features out faster. But without tests, every future change risks breaking existing features. Developers slow down because they're afraid to change things.
Unclear code. Quick code without proper naming and organization works fine. But when another developer (or the same developer months later) needs to modify it, they spend hours understanding what it does before they can change it.
Each of these shortcuts saves time initially. Each creates ongoing costs.
Why Technical Debt Happens
Technical debt doesn't accumulate because developers are lazy or incompetent. It accumulates because of rational decisions made under constraints.
Time Pressure
The most common cause. Deadlines force trade-offs. When launch is in two weeks and the feature isn't done, shortcuts become attractive.
This is sometimes the right call. Getting to market quickly may matter more than perfect code. The problem is when "temporary" shortcuts become permanent.
Changing Requirements
Your product evolves. Features built for one purpose get repurposed. Systems designed for 100 users need to handle 10,000. Code that was appropriate for early requirements becomes debt as requirements change.
This type of debt is often unavoidable. You can't predict every future requirement.
Learning and Growth
Early code is often written with incomplete understanding. As the team learns what works, earlier decisions look like mistakes in retrospect.
This is healthy. It means the team is improving. The debt accumulates when there's never time to apply those learnings to existing code.
Poor Decisions
Sometimes shortcuts are genuinely bad ideas. Inexperienced developers, lack of code review, or "good enough" cultures create debt that should have been avoided.
Distinguishing unavoidable debt from poor decisions matters for understanding your team's competence.
Types of Technical Debt
Not all technical debt is equal. Different types have different costs and urgency.
Architecture Debt
Problems in the fundamental structure of your application. The overall design doesn't fit your needs.
Signs: Major features require changes across the entire codebase. Adding new capabilities means fighting the existing system rather than building on it.
Cost: Very high. Architectural problems often require significant rewrites to address.
Example: An application built as a single large codebase when it should have been split into separate services. Every change touches more code than necessary, and the system becomes fragile.
Code Quality Debt
Problems in how individual pieces of code are written. The logic is messy, unclear, or duplicated.
Signs: Simple changes take unexpectedly long. Developers spend more time reading code than writing it. The same bugs keep reappearing.
Cost: Medium, but compounds. Each piece of low-quality code makes surrounding code worse.
Example: A payment processing module with logic scattered across five files, variable names that don't describe their contents, and no comments explaining the business rules it implements.
Testing Debt
Missing or inadequate automated tests. The application works, but there's no safety net for changes.
Signs: Developers are hesitant to modify existing features. Bug fixes frequently cause new bugs. Releases require extensive manual testing.
Cost: Grows over time. Early in a project, testing debt matters less. As the codebase grows, the cost compounds.
Example: An application with no automated tests. Every new feature can potentially break existing functionality, and no one knows until users report problems.
Documentation Debt
Missing documentation about how systems work, why decisions were made, or how to modify things.
Signs: New team members take months to become productive. Institutional knowledge lives only in certain developers' heads. The same questions get answered repeatedly.
Cost: Often underestimated. The cost is distributed across onboarding, maintenance, and decision-making.
Example: A complex integration with a third-party service. The developer who built it left. No one documented how it works. Fixing problems requires reverse-engineering the implementation.
Dependency Debt
Outdated libraries, frameworks, or tools. The application runs on old versions that lack features, security updates, or community support.
Signs: Security vulnerabilities can't be patched easily. New features require newer versions of dependencies. Finding developers who know old technologies gets harder.
Cost: Increases with time. Eventually, the gap becomes so large that updating requires a major project.
Example: An application built on React 16 when React 18 offers significant improvements. Or using a database version that stopped receiving security patches.
When Technical Debt Is Acceptable
Despite its negative connotations, some technical debt is strategic. The key is intentionality.
MVP Speed Trade-offs
When validating a product idea, perfect code is waste. If the idea doesn't work, you'll throw the code away anyway. If the idea does work, you can invest in quality later.
Acceptable debt in this context:
Code that works but isn't elegant
Limited testing for core paths only
Documentation sufficient for the small team
Architecture that handles current scale, not future projections
Unacceptable debt even in MVPs:
Security vulnerabilities
Data integrity issues that corrupt user information
Bugs that make the product unusable
Code so messy that no one can modify it
Competitive Timing
Sometimes first-mover advantage matters more than code quality. Shipping before a competitor may justify shortcuts.
This is a business decision, not a development decision. Make it explicitly, understanding the costs you're accepting.
Known Temporary Code
When you know code will be replaced—a pilot program, a one-time migration, a prototype for user research—building it quickly makes sense.
The risk is "temporary" becoming permanent. Document why it's temporary and when it should be replaced.
When Technical Debt Becomes Dangerous
Some patterns indicate debt has accumulated to dangerous levels.
Development Is Slowing Down
Features that used to take days now take weeks. Simple changes require complex modifications. The team spends more time fighting the codebase than building new things.
This signals that debt has compounded. Each shortcut makes the next change harder, which encourages more shortcuts, which makes things worse.
Bugs Multiply
Fixing one bug creates two new ones. The same types of problems keep recurring. Releases require extensive testing because anything might break.
This often indicates testing debt combined with code quality debt. Without tests, changes have unpredictable effects. Without clean code, understanding the impact of changes is impossible.
Team Morale Drops
Good developers don't enjoy working in bad codebases. If your team seems frustrated, talks about "rewrites," or has higher turnover than expected, debt might be the cause.
This leads to a spiral: frustrated developers do lower-quality work or leave, which makes the codebase worse, which frustrates remaining developers more.
New Features Require Major Effort
When product asks for something that should be simple and development estimates weeks, debt is likely the cause.
The feature itself might be simple. But building it on a broken foundation requires fixing that foundation first—or hacking around it and adding more debt.
Measuring Technical Debt
Technical debt is difficult to quantify, but some indicators help:
Velocity trend: Track how long features take over time. If similar-sized features take longer now than they did six months ago, debt is accumulating.
Bug rate: Count bugs per feature or per release. Increasing bug rates often indicate quality problems in the codebase.
Developer estimates: Ask your team to estimate work. If their estimates for small features seem high, they're probably accounting for debt.
Code complexity metrics: Technical tools can measure code complexity, duplication, and test coverage. These are imperfect but directionally useful.
Developer feedback: Ask your team directly about code quality. They know where the problems are.
Preventing Technical Debt
Prevention is cheaper than remediation. These practices limit debt accumulation:
Build Time for Quality
Don't fill every sprint with features. Leave 10-20% of development time for refactoring, testing, and cleanup.
This feels like it slows you down. It doesn't. Teams with quality time sustain velocity. Teams without it slow down as debt accumulates.
Code Review
Every change should be reviewed by another developer before merging. Reviews catch shortcuts, suggest improvements, and spread knowledge across the team.
Reviews take time. That time is an investment in preventing future problems.
Automated Testing
Require tests for new features. Testing as you build is dramatically cheaper than testing later.
The coverage doesn't need to be perfect. Testing critical paths prevents the worst bugs.
Incremental Improvement
When modifying existing code, leave it slightly better than you found it. Fix the obvious issues while you're there.
This prevents debt from accumulating without requiring dedicated cleanup projects.
Clear Technical Leadership
Someone needs to own technical quality. Whether it's a CTO, tech lead, or senior developer, someone should be responsible for preventing debt accumulation.
Without ownership, debt grows unchecked.
Paying Down Technical Debt
When debt has accumulated, you need a strategy to address it.
Don't Attempt Complete Rewrites
The urge to "start over" is strong when facing bad code. Complete rewrites are almost always wrong.
Rewrites take longer than estimated. They introduce new bugs. They throw away all the lessons learned in the existing system. And they often accumulate their own debt under pressure to catch up to the old system's features.
Incremental Refactoring
Attack debt piece by piece. When working on a feature, improve the related code. When fixing a bug, clean up the surrounding area.
This is slower but sustainable. You continue shipping features while gradually improving quality.
Targeted Remediation
Some debt is worse than others. Identify the areas causing the most problems and focus there.
The accounting module that everyone avoids touching. The reporting system that causes two bugs per change. The user authentication that has had three security incidents. Target these first.
Add Tests Before Changes
Before modifying risky code, add tests that verify current behavior. These tests prevent you from accidentally changing how things work while you're improving how things are written.
Set a Threshold
Decide how much debt is acceptable. Track it over time. When it exceeds the threshold, prioritize paying it down.
This prevents debt from reaching crisis levels.
Having the Conversation With Your Team
When your development team mentions technical debt, ask these questions:
What specifically is the debt? Get concrete examples, not general claims. Understanding the specific problems helps you evaluate their importance.
How is it affecting us? What takes longer because of this debt? What risks does it create? The answer should connect to business outcomes you care about.
What would fixing it require? Understand the investment needed. Is this a week of work or three months?
What happens if we don't fix it? Sometimes debt can wait. Sometimes it can't. Understand the trajectory.
How do we prevent this? For new debt, understand what created it and what would prevent recurrence.
Good development teams talk about debt openly. Hidden debt is more dangerous than acknowledged debt.
Key Takeaways
Technical debt is real and affects how quickly your product can evolve. Understanding it helps you make better decisions about trade-offs.
Technical debt is the gap between how software is built and how it should be built. Shortcuts create future costs.
Some debt is acceptable. MVP speed trade-offs, competitive timing, and known temporary code can justify shortcuts. The key is intentionality.
Dangerous signs include slowing development, multiplying bugs, dropping morale, and simple features requiring major effort.
Prevention is cheaper than remediation. Build time for quality, require code reviews, and maintain automated tests.
Pay down debt incrementally. Complete rewrites rarely work. Targeted improvements while shipping features is sustainable.
At NextBuild, we build MVPs with appropriate shortcuts for speed while avoiding the kinds of debt that prevent iteration. If you're dealing with accumulated technical debt that's slowing down your product, we can assess the situation and recommend a path forward.
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