In tech companies across Australia, 'tech debt' is thrown around as a catch-all excuse for prioritising certain engineering work. But this concept is often misunderstood and can be harmful to technical roadmap planning.
The Origin Story: What Tech Debt Was Meant to Be
When Ward Cunningham coined 'technical debt' in 1992, he described a specific phenomenon: making conscious trade-offs between immediate delivery and long-term code quality. Like financial debt, these decisions could help you move quickly now but would accumulate 'interest' over time.
The key element is intentionality—you understand you're making a trade-off that will need addressing later.
Where It All Went Wrong
Today, 'tech debt' has morphed into a vague bucket for anything engineers don't like about their codebase:
- "The previous team wrote this in PHP, and we prefer Python. It's tech debt."
- "This codebase is five years old. It's all tech debt."
- "I don't understand how this algorithm works. Must be tech debt."
Most of this doesn't match Cunningham's original concept. Instead, "tech debt" has become shorthand for technology you lack expertise in, code that's difficult to understand, older parts of the system, or work that engineers want to do but struggle to justify in business terms.
Why Banning 'Tech Debt' Makes Sense
When planning your technical roadmap, ban the term 'tech debt' entirely. Instead, articulate what you're really trying to achieve:
- "We need to reduce deployment time from 45 minutes to 5 minutes."
- "We need to rewrite the authentication service to eliminate security vulnerabilities."
- "We need to replace our custom cache with Redis to improve page load times."
These are investments with clear, measurable outcomes—not vague 'debt repayments'.
The Investment Mindset: A Better Framework
Rather than 'paying down debt', adopt an investment mindset. Every initiative should be viewed as an investment with an expected return:
- Platform investments: Improve developer productivity, reliability, or security
- Performance investments: Reduce latency or improve resource utilisation
- Capability investments: Enable new business functions or improve existing ones
- Knowledge investments: Build expertise in technologies for future growth
This approach forces you to justify technical work in terms of business outcomes and creates a common language for engineering leaders and business stakeholders.
The Commercial Engineering Leader
Engineering leaders who adopt this investment-focused approach become more commercially minded. They stop talking about abstract 'debt' and start discussing concrete returns:
- "If we invest in our deployment pipeline, we'll save each developer 45 minutes per day, freeing up 20% more capacity for feature development."
- "By investing in service mesh technology, we'll reduce the time to launch new services from weeks to days, accelerating our market expansion."
This commercial mindset creates stronger partnerships with product, finance, and executive leadership, positioning engineering as a strategic function making calculated investments to drive business growth.
Moving Forward: Breaking the Debt Cycle
To implement this approach:
- Reclassify all 'tech debt' items as specific types of investments
- Establish clear metrics for measuring returns on technical investments
- Train engineers to articulate technical needs in terms of business impact
- Create regular review cycles to assess whether investments are delivering expected returns
Some items previously labelled as 'tech debt' won't survive this transition—they can't be justified as investments. That's a feature of this approach, not a bug.
Time to grow up as an industry
'Tech debt' had its day as a useful metaphor, but it's time to move on. By banning the term and adopting an investment mindset, you'll create technical roadmaps that are more aligned with business needs, easier to communicate to non-technical stakeholders, and more successful at delivering real value.
The best engineering leaders aren't those who pay down the most debt—they're the ones who make the smartest investments.