Technical debt

Technical debt isn't a technical problem. It's everyone's problem.

 Yet there's this ongoing tension between engineers and the rest of the organization about balancing technical debt with feature delivery and speed. Most people still see it as purely an engineering concern.

The reality is, technical debt is product debt. It limits what your product can do and slows down your entire company, regardless of whether you're in sales, design, or leadership.

The mechanic is simple; you're trading higher velocity today for lower velocity tomorrow. 

When you build Feature A with compromises on the technical foundation, Project B inherits those compromises. To ship Project B, you make more compromises to work around the earlier ones. Project C inherits both sets of compromises. The cycle compounds over time.

On the flip side, good technical foundations open doors you didn't even know existed. They create opportunities for future products and features that would otherwise be impossible or extremely expensive.

The idea here is not to build for perfect architecture. But to stop treating technical debt as an engineering problem. 

It's a decision that affects everyone's ability to move fast, both now and in the future.