On CTO Sync: Winning Support to Pay Down Technical Debt
CTO Sync featured my approach to winning stakeholder support for technical debt paydown: weighing blast radius, exposing consequences to leadership, and reserving a fixed slice of every cycle for paydown.
CTO Sync featured my take on winning stakeholder support for technical debt paydown, as part of a roundup with engineering leaders from Ronas IT, Jelvix, and others.
My answer covers how I weigh technical debt by blast radius — prioritizing whatever threatens reliability, security, or the next release, and being honest about one-off fixes versus investing in a shared platform. On the funding side, it comes down to visibility: putting the full cost of not fixing something in front of leadership before they sign off on a plan, and reserving a small, fixed, non-negotiable slice of every cycle for paydown so it never has to compete head-to-head with new features.
