Every engineering leader runs into the same challenge: how to keep shipping fast without letting the codebase fall apart.
In the early days, speed comes easily. But as the team grows and complexity increases, things slow down.
Engineers avoid certain parts of the code. The product team starts asking why simple changes take so long. The real issue isn’t the new work. It’s the weight of what’s already there. That’s unmanaged tech debt.
In this post, I’ll share practical ways to manage it without slowing delivery, and why it's a leadership challenge, not just a technical one.
Tech Debt Isn’t the Problem. Visibility Is.
Technical debt is what happens when you prioritize speed and postpone perfect structure, and not a sign of laziness or poor engineering. Most debt is a trade-off made under pressure.
The real problem with tech debt is that most teams don't know where it lives, track how much it costs, communicate it outside the engineering organization, and budget realistically to fix it.
The Three Types of Tech Debt
Not all tech debt is the same, and treating it like it is can lead to poor decisions. To manage it effectively, you need to know what kind of debt you're dealing with. Here are the three main types every engineering leader should recognize.
Strategic Debt
This is the intentional kind. Strategic debt comes from conscious, short-term trade-offs made to move faster, such as meeting a deadline or testing an idea quickly.
It’s not a bad thing if the decision is clearly documented and revisited later.
For example, a team might say, “Let’s hardcode this flow so we can test it with customers next week.”
The risk comes when these quick fixes are never cleaned up and quietly become part of the long-term codebase.
Environmental Debt
This type of debt builds up over time as your product and team grow. It’s often the result of decisions that once made sense but no longer fit the current scale or architecture.
You might start with a system designed for a small team and a simple use case. But as you add more engineers, features, and users, that same system can start to create friction.
Environmental debt is a natural part of scaling. The danger is in ignoring it and expecting old systems to support new demands without adjustment.
For example, a monolith built for five engineers might now need to support 15 teams working across multiple services. Without rethinking the architecture, progress will slow and quality will suffer.
Accidental Debt
This is the most dangerous type of tech debt because it happens without anyone noticing, until it starts causing real problems.
It often comes from rushed work, lack of clear ownership, inconsistent coding practices, or team misalignment. No one sets out to create it, but it piles up quickly when teams are under pressure and corners get cut.
Over time, this leads to fragile systems, confusing logic, and a higher risk of bugs and outages.
For example, feature flag logic might get duplicated across six services with no audit trail, making changes risky and debugging a nightmare.
Every organization carries all three types of tech debt. The most successful teams track it, talk about it openly, and manage it with intention.
Why Debt Slows Down Teams
Tech debt doesn’t usually lead to major outages, but it creates constant friction. Onboarding new engineers takes longer, simple features become risky to implement, and bugs tend to cluster around the same fragile parts of the code.
Engineers end up spending more time maintaining systems than building new ones. Because these issues rarely feel urgent, they often get pushed aside and go unresolved until they become real blockers.
Three Frameworks That Help
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to managing tech debt, but some frameworks have proven especially useful. These three can help your team stay fast while keeping quality in check.
Pain vs. Impact Matrix
This framework is used at companies like Intercom and Segment to prioritize tech debt against roadmap work.
Each issue is mapped across two key questions:
- How painful is this for the team?
- How much does it impact delivery, safety, or speed?
Based on the answers, you can take action:
- High pain and high impact? Fix it immediately.
- High impact but low pain? Schedule it.
- High pain but low impact? Keep an eye on team morale.
- Low pain and low impact? Defer for now.
This approach gives product and engineering a shared language and helps prevent frustration from quietly turning into attrition.
Just-in-Time Refactoring
This framework helps teams improve code quality without slowing down delivery. Instead of setting aside large chunks of time for refactoring, you make small, meaningful improvements as part of your regular work.
The idea is simple: refactor only the code you’re already working on. This approach, used at companies like Basecamp and Slack, avoids speculative rewrites and helps maintain steady progress.
It also builds a healthy engineering habit, which is to always leave the code a little better than you found it.
The 70/20/10 Resource Model
Popularized by Atlassian and others, this model helps teams balance delivery with long-term quality:
- 70% of team time goes to product delivery
- 20% to platform and infrastructure
- 10% to refactoring and maintenance
The exact ratio can vary, but the key idea is to intentionally budget time for managing technical debt, just like you do for product work. Without a clear allocation, debt tends to be pushed aside.
What High-Performing Teams Do Differently
High-performing teams build tech debt management into their regular workflows, which is a critical layer in the talent stack of modern engineering teams, rather than treating it as an occasional cleanup task.
One example is how Shopify integrates tech debt flags directly into sprint planning. Engineers are given space to propose improvements that boost reliability or reduce ongoing friction, with PMs supporting prioritization.
Slack runs quarterly health weeks focused on proactive cleanup and strengthening the platform.
At Intercom, incident data is used to pinpoint fragile systems and commit to follow-up work.
The common thread across these teams is discipline. They treat technical debt as a core part of how they build and ship.
How to Talk About Tech Debt Outside Engineering
Most tech leaders agree that the real challenge is getting permission to fix technical debt. That means learning to communicate its impact in ways that product, design, and executive stakeholders can understand.
Here are a few strategies that work:
- Frame it in terms of velocity: “We could ship this in 2 weeks instead of 6 if we didn’t need to work around this fragile dependency.”
- Quantify the drag: “This legacy service is costing 2 days of dev time per sprint.”
- Use real stories: “We delayed a critical feature launch because this system had no test coverage.”
- Use analogies: “Think of it like infrastructure. If we don’t maintain the roads, we slow down everything that runs on top of them.”
In the end, you're advocating for long-term speed and stability.
Where Adeva Fits Into This Picture
Managing tech debt is hard when your team is already stretched thin. It requires senior-level ownership, not just hands-on keys.
At Adeva, we work with product companies that need to move fast, without leaving a mess behind.
We embed engineers who ramp quickly, align with your roadmap, and raise the quality of the systems they work in.
They're outcome-focused engineers who clean as they go and know when to challenge trade-offs that create future debt.
If you need to ship and stabilize at the same time, the kind of engineers you embed matters.
That’s where we specialize.
The result? You boost your engineering capacity without slowing down, shipping fast while keeping your codebase healthy for the long run.
Final Thought
You can’t scale without some technical debt, and that’s okay. The real question is whether your team knows where it lives, what it’s costing, who owns it, and how to make time to fix it.
Great teams move fast, but they also clean as they go. They don’t aim for perfection, but they don’t let speed create long-term drag.
Technical debt is part of building. Managing it well is a skill, and like any skill, it can be designed into your system.
