Technical debt for non-technical leaders
A plain-language framework for non-technical leaders to talk about technical debt without being snowed.
Two kinds of debt
Deliberate debt is a known shortcut taken to ship faster, written down with a plan to pay it back.
Accidental debt is the mess that piles up when nobody is paying attention — usually the more expensive of the two.
What to ask the team
What slows us down most often? What would we re-do if we had a week? What is the next failure waiting to happen? The answers are usually the real backlog.
Common questions
- How much debt is normal?
- Some is healthy. The signal that it's too much is when the team spends more time fixing yesterday's work than shipping today's.