Partner with Product to pay down technical debt

Summary

Technical debt is inevitable. I learned this the hard way. At one company, I joined to lead Engineering just as the team started building a new product for a new market. The team had worked for five years on a different product that they described as riddled with technical debt. It was a support nightmare. They were thrilled to start fresh. It was a chance to get it right! I shouldn’t have been surprised when we chose technologies and made architectural and implementation decisions that we later came to regret. We were a good team, but we weren’t clairvoyant. We couldn’t see all of the ways the product would need to serve customers a year or two down the road. In short, you can’t avoid at least some technical debt. Deferred maintenance – don’t let this happen to you! I’ve developed an approach that treats remediating technical debt as a partnership challenge more than a technical one. Here’s how it works. Make technical debt visible I like to start by making technical debt visible. Let the whole team come together to identify and categorize problem areas. We’re looking for security issues, performance bottlenecks, and code that’s just hard to work with. This needs periodic updating, by the way — no more than quarterly. Your technical debt landscape changes as you build new features, as old problems get worse, and as your business grows and changes. But here’s the key: we track this stuff with business impact in mind. We measure things like how often we’re having production incidents, how long features are taking to deliver, and where our defect rates are highest. This gives us data we can actually use in conversations with Product leadership. Build solid relationships with Product leaders Which brings me to the most important part — building solid relationships with Product leaders. This can and should happen at all levels of your organization. The idea is to create real give and take with Product, helping them understand how the state of the codebase actually affec...