Three years later the technical debt is still there and now it's a crisis blocking new features.
This pattern plays out constantly in enterprise software and banking tech. Tech debt starts manageable but accumulates faster than teams can pay it down because it never makes the priority list.
Small shortcuts compound. Quick fixes pile up. Temporary solutions become permanent. Everyone knows it needs attention but there's always something more urgent.
Real example from banking: Service built as temporary workaround for launch deadline. "We'll refactor this properly after launch." That service ran in production for four years. Original developer left after two. By year three nobody fully understood how it worked but we were terrified to touch it because so many other things depended on it.
When I finally got time to refactor it took six weeks instead of the two days it would've taken initially. Every shortcut we took to save time cost us 10x later.
Here's why tech debt never gets prioritized:
Product teams can't see it. Stakeholders can't see it. Doesn't show up in roadmaps or customer demos. What they see is new features, revenue impact, user growth. Invisible problem always loses to visible opportunity.
Every sprint planning same conversation happens. Engineers flag technical debt that needs attention. PM acknowledges it matters but points to committed features. "We'll tackle it next quarter for sure." Next quarter arrives with new commitments and same conversation repeats.
Tech debt only becomes priority when it breaks something customers see. By then the fix is exponentially harder because you've built multiple features on top of the unstable foundation. And everyone wonders why the estimate is suddenly so high.
Teams that handle this well dedicate fixed capacity every sprint. Twenty percent of velocity goes to technical health regardless of feature pressure. Non-negotiable.
But most organizations struggle with this. Shipping eighty percent of potential feature velocity feels like leaving value on the table. Until the system breaks and suddenly you're shipping zero percent because you're firefighting production issues caused by accumulated technical debt.
I've seen teams try hiding technical debt work inside feature estimates. Pad the story points, slip refactoring in quietly. Works until someone notices velocity dropped and you're explaining why you wasted time on internal work instead of customer value.
The honest approach is making technical health visible and defending the time it needs. But that requires leadership that understands compound interest works both ways. Technical shortcuts create interest that compounds just like financial debt.
How does your organization actually handle this? Does technical debt get real priority or is it always next quarter indefinitely?
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