On Tech Magazine: Making Technical Debt Compete for the Roadmap
My take in Tech Magazine's expert roundup on balancing technical debt against new features.
Tech Magazine featured my take on how software teams balance technical debt against new features, as part of an expert roundup with engineering leaders from Listening.com, Devox Software, Ringy, and others.
My answer pushes back on giving debt a protected lane or a fixed percentage of every cycle. I treat it like any other program: each planning cycle the debt goes on the same table as the feature bets and the platform investments, and it has to justify its own risk and value against everything else competing for the same engineers. If paying it down reduces more risk or unlocks more value than the next feature, it wins the capacity and runs as a first-class program, with an owner, a plan, and a definition of done. If it does not clear that bar, it waits, on the record, and we look again next cycle. The job of the technical program manager is to make the cost of not doing it visible, the concrete hit to reliability, security, or the ability to ship the next feature, so leaders are comparing real tradeoffs instead of a shiny feature against an invisible risk. Once debt competes out loud every cycle, the right work wins on merit, and nobody has to defend an arbitrary percentage.
