Tech Debt Surveys Bring Order to Chaos
When executives ask why features are taking so long to deliver, engineering leaders often respond with, “we have a significant tech debt problem.” To the engineer, this describes deadlines untethered to system realities, unbalanced pressures requiring workarounds, and manual processes. To the executive, none of that is clear, and this sounds like a poor manager complaining about working conditions. Neither gets closer to solving the problem, and both grow more frustrated with each iteration.
Last summer I wrote an article for Fast Company about a problem I’d been wrestling with for about a decade: how to help chief executives see technical debt as a business strategy issue rather than an IT problem.
The insight that prompted the article came from working with companies where engineering teams were clearly communicating their constraints, but executives couldn’t act on what they were hearing. Not because executives were ignoring engineers, but because:
- the language gap made it impossible to translate technical reality into business decisions
- the communications were specific about localized, not enterprise-wide, issues
The Measurement Breakthrough
Since 2021, Chris Swan and I have been hosting the Tech Debt Burndown podcast, talking with engineering leaders about this exact challenge. What I kept seeing at customer engagements was that while individual teams know their local pain points, nobody was able to create an organization-wide view of exactly how technical debt impacts the business.
That’s what led me to write about systematic measurement through comprehensive anonymous engineering surveys. This approach transforms isolated team complaints into aggregated strategic intelligence that executives can use to inform decisions.
The surveys capture both technical specifics and business impact: time spent on maintenance versus new features, which systems create friction, what technical limitations block business objectives. The critical piece is expert analysis that translates findings into dollars and velocity.
Instead of “We need to refactor the authentication service,” which sounds like a waste of time and money to fix something that should already work, executives see statements like “$200K investment reduces feature delivery time by 30% and eliminates $50K monthly in authentication-related outage costs.”
That rushed product launch? $35K monthly in customer support overhead.
Delayed infrastructure upgrades? $220K annually in reduced development velocity.
These are statements business people can engage with and work to solve.
Why This Changes Everything
Technical debt operates exactly like financial debt. A little can accelerate growth, but unmanaged, it compounds at credit card interest rates rather than favorable corporate financing terms.
The difference is that most companies manage financial debt systematically while conducting at best ad hoc and tactical technical debt management.
Even high-performing companies like Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, and Booking.com devote up to 20% of engineering time to managing technical debt. They’ve figured out what many companies haven’t: systematic measurement and management of tech debt enables velocity rather than slowing it down.
The companies that win treat technical debt as a business discipline with clear ROI and executive ownership. They make informed trade-offs because they can see actual costs and benefits, not because engineers are complaining louder.
A Take-Away
Savvy CEOs can build technical debt visibility without massive investment. The core of this program is:
- establishing baseline measurement through anonymous surveys
- translating technical findings into business metrics
- identifying high-impact opportunities
- integrating technical debt curation and reduction into business planning as a standing agenda item
My goal was to give executives a way to transform technical debt from an invisible drag into a manageable strategic initiative. Not to eliminate technical debt (it will always exist in companies that innovate) but to manage it the way you’d manage any other business liability.
Read the full article at Fast Company for the complete framework on systematic measurement and how it transforms technical debt into strategic business intelligence executives can act on.