“We’ll refactor later” without roadmap entries is compound interest eating every sprint. Debt must be visible in numbers and calendar.
Debt classes
- Deliberate MVP shortcut
- Bit rot (stale deps)
- Architecture drift
- Test debt
Metrics
- Lead time, deploy frequency (DORA)
- Post-release bug rate
- 15–25% sprint capacity for debt is normal
Process
Debt register with impact score. One “platform health” epic per quarter.
Checklist
- Top-10 debt items with owner
- Link debt to revenue risk
- Post-mortem → debt ticket
First steps with tech debt
- Collect top-10 pain points in a 30-min retro
- Score impact and effort — prioritize impact/effort
- Reserve 15–20% sprint or one quarterly epic
- Track one metric per debt item fixed