Technical Debt

Summary

Shortcuts taken to ship faster now that cost more to maintain or extend later — a PM's job is to understand it enough to advocate for paying it down at the right moments, not ignore or fear it.

• 1Ask an engineer on your team to walk you through a real piece of technical debt.
• 2Learn to frame technical debt paydown in terms of future velocity, for non-technical stakeholders.
• 3Practice allocating a fixed % of every sprint to debt paydown as a negotiation tactic.