Debts, Tech and Otherwise

Summary

09 March 2025 tl;dr A colleague of mine, Scott Porad (CTO, VP Engineering) posted on LinkedIn, asking, "What are all the other kinds of debt like tech debt?" He listed out a few, then asked for others to weigh in, and the list grew... kinda long. And interesting. And made me think about the metaphor more deeply. His list included financial debt (the OG), Product debt (gaps in the product that impact revenue or lead to support costs), Ops Debt (manual processes performed by the operations team because the software doesn't support the processes), Process Debt (valuable steps of the software development process that are skipped causing quality or velocity issues), and Org Debt (key roles that are not staffed that cause quality or velocity issues). He then asked others to weigh in with their favorites, and the answers poured in. Many (I won't list them all--partly because I want you to read the original post!) were interesting, and I think they fall into a variety of different categories: Technological. Whether it's the data, the UX/Design, the backend, or even the choice to over-depend on open-source without "giving back". Documentation falls in here, too. Procedural. What processes are being done by hand that cost the team time, money, or energy? What sorts of things are being hidden by a "lightweight process" focus (a la "agile") because companies are afraid to institute a process, lest they be called "not agile"? Mental. What assumptions were made that turned out to be wrong? What assumptions were right "back then" but no longer hold? Is the organization chasing the right problems? What knowledge is missing from the people that need to know? Cultural. Any group of humans forms a culture, but is that culture serving the business, or holding it back? Talent. A few of the responses mentioned "youth" or "experience" debt, as in a lack of investment into junior talent, or a refusal to recognize the value of experienced veteran talent on the team. Likewise, having "not en...