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The Perfect Process to Manage Technical Debt
Lessons from interviewing 200+ engineers
Over the last six months, I’ve learned how the best software engineers and leaders manage technical debt. I’ve interviewed more than 200 experts to understand how tech debt is handled at growing software companies. I’ve discovered what many companies are missing and compiled my learnings into a simple but powerful framework to share with you.
As part of the customer-development work for our free Stepsize product, I needed to understand the differences between software companies that have their tech debt under control and those that don’t.
Tech debt is an emotional topic, and it gets people talking like nothing else — and it’s a lot less controversial than politics. Just ask your local engineer about tech debt, and you’ll see. But you might want to clear your schedule first.
The Costs and Benefits of Managing Tech Debt
In many — if not most — cases, tech debt accumulates until it creates problems that are impossible to ignore. So you fix these problems and move on with your life. And you accept that maybe that’s just how it’s done.
But should we really accept the results of Stripe’s research, which find that at the average company, “engineers spend ~33% of their time dealing with technical debt, which crushes team morale and costs companies ~$85 Billion/year”? Shouldn’t we do something?
Gartner and many others have already shown us we should. Their research has revealed that organisations who actively manage tech debt will ship at least 50% faster.
I don’t know a single software company that doesn’t want to ship 50% faster.
Luckily, I did meet companies with solid tech debt–management strategies. There were many light-bulb moments in these interviews. One of my favourites was when James Rosen, engineering manager at Everlane, told me:
“Consider how much time PMs spend curating the set of features to work on. Now compare this to the amount of time and effort engineers dedicate to making the business case for tech debt. Is it that surprising that close to zero engineering capacity gets allocated to tech debt?”
