How can you avoid technical debt during product development?

Defining goals is important in product development to provide clarity, focus, and measurable criteria for success, ensuring that teams work efficiently toward achieving meaningful objectives that align with the product vision and business goals. Here's what to consider: ?? Alignment: Ensure everyone shares the same vision. ?? ?? SMART Goals: Be specific, measurable, and time-bound. ? ??? Communication: Foster transparent communication. ?? Validation: Challenge assumptions with data. ?? Prioritize: Focus on what adds value. ?? Doc.: Thoroughly document goals for a shared understanding. ?? Iterate: Adapt to evolving needs. Solid goals reduce the risk of technical debt due to shifting priorities or unclear objectives.

Looking at this article, I can't help but roll my eyes. Unless you are a PM in a successful, established, and mature Product, you are fighting for survival. That means you have to take the cost/time/quality triangle and comprise somewhere. Usually, you have a limited budget, and you have to deliver quality product to get users stick. Thus, the usual optimization vector is speed, so introducing tech debt to your product. As a Product Manager, don't be afraid to do this on your way to product market fit and profitability. Writing code for code's sake is not how you win the market game!

There is often discussion in product teams that tech debt is because of lazy developers or bad codeing standards, actually tech debt in most cases that I have seen is because of opaque product roadmap and vision. when PM tries to get an MVP out faster and not think how would they scale it later, that causes the root of Tech Debt. PM should have atleast 1 year very high level roadmap of what would be required from the product, you might not implement all that but your tech team will build the foundation of the feature that can be expandable later.

Technical debt tends to accumulate during rapid progress, particularly when testing early MVPs for validation. Valid reasons often prompt teams to incur technical debt at this stage. It is important for teams to proactively dedicate specific time within the roadmap to handle and mitigate such debt. 1. Integrate Refactoring as You Progress: Set aside time for refactoring to address emerging technical debt while the codebase remains manageable. 2. Emphasize on Technical Debt Reduction: To prevent its accumulation and obstruction of progress. 3. Align with the Product Roadmap: Ensure that the effort to address debt aligns with the product's long-term goals by engaging stakeholders and gathering their insights on trade-offs and priorities

From my perspective, the lack of agile product management is often the root cause of this issue. Let me succinctly explain the process for a new product: 1. OKR Analysis. 2. Problem Identification. 3. Discovery and Solution Delivery (ideally, involving UX and DEV). 4. Goal Definition (Roadmap, setting KPIs, and planning releases). 5. User Stories: Utilize user stories to outline all the necessary tasks and divide them into sprint deliveries. 6. Clear Objectives: Base your goals on an analysis of the company's and team's objectives to establish concrete targets. Involve the team in the process, encourage the exploration of new solutions, and foster a culture of collaborative work to develop innovative solutions together.

Sometimes our developers need to swiftly finish a task due to time pressure, or to urgently hotfix a bug to bring the system up-and-running for our users. That could result in less attention to coding standards. It's essential that we commit to allocating dedicated time for our development team to follow-up on this topic and refactor the particular code snippet when stress is diminished.

Technical debt can also stem from code that's inconsistent and lacks quality. When code is messy or poorly written, it becomes challenging to comprehend and modify, raising the likelihood of errors and bugs. To sidestep this, adhere to coding standards and practices that promote consistency, readability, and ease of maintenance. Employ tools and methods like code analysis, reviews, and formatting to keep your code in check and enhance its quality. This way, you can prevent technical debt from accumulating due to messy or subpar code.

Adhering to coding standards is like speaking a coherent, unified language—it clears ambiguity, making the code a readable, understandable manuscript. This coherence is a shield against bugs and errors, ensuring the code evolves gracefully. Utilizing tools for analysis and reviews is akin to having a meticulous editor, refining the code, ensuring its longevity and adaptability. It’s this commitment to excellence and consistency in coding practices that builds a robust foundation, allowing the product to thrive and adapt, free from the shackles of unwieldy, opaque code structures.

About following coding standards. Personally, I always aim to have developers I trust with me during product development. In fact, I've learned a lot from them. I'd like to quote a passage from a refactoring book, which serves as an ally to programmers. It says: "Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand." In this context, a PO or PM who truly understands the importance of programming will likely grant autonomy to their developer to use good coding practices to produce quality code.

This isn't describing tech debt, it's describing bad software. The lack of adequate test automation is the tech debt. You're avoiding cost now and accepting cost later + interest. Defects, performance issues and vulnerabilities that testing would've caught are the interest payments. You keep incurring these payments until you pay off the debt by implementing test automation. To pay off the interest you have to fix the issues. The payments come in the form of reduced customer value, increased developer effort and increased customer and business risk.

Perfect! Having test automation optimizes product delivery and significantly enhances the quality of deliveries. When it comes to implementing automated tests, not all companies can do it. The tip here for you, as a Product Owner (PO) or Product Manager (PM), is to understand the skills your team possesses and help them develop professionally by providing opportunities to enhance their abilities and adopt new development techniques, such as automated testing. At this point, I consider the role of the PO/PM as a leader who supports and encourages the team to continually improve, motivating the adoption of best practices and techniques in software development. By doing so, you will achieve exceptional deliveries.

Another factor contributing to technical debt is the absence of thorough testing and automation. When testing is neglected or manual, defects, performance glitches, or security loopholes can slip through undetected, jeopardizing the functionality and reliability of the product. To steer clear of this pitfall, it's crucial to institute testing and automation techniques that enable comprehensive verification and validation of product quality. This includes employing strategies like unit testing, integration testing, and end-to-end testing.

Incorporating testing and automation is like having vigilant sentinels—it uncovers hidden flaws and vulnerabilities, safeguarding functionality and reliability. It’s a proactive step to ensure that every layer of the product stands robust against potential setbacks. Utilizing a spectrum of testing methods and automation tools is the bedrock of product resilience. It’s not just about detecting issues; it’s about fostering a culture of relentless refinement and enhancement. These strategic implementations are the architects of reliability, paving the way for seamless, unassailable products that stand the test of evolving demands and challenges.

Unmanaged dependencies build up to tech debt and expose the product to availability, security and compliance risks. Each organisation I've worked with had different dependency management strategies, from team-level rules to org-wide policies. In highly-regulated environments, where security and compliance are paramount, dependency management policies are part of the org handbook. In other industries, I've seen teams deciding by themselves; from not updating dependencies until absolutely necessary (end of support from provider) to updating dependencies as soon as minor versions are available, which could introduce unexpected bugs. My take as a PM: make dependency management a team decision, considering industry and org requirements.

Adverse: You shouldn't avoid tech debt; you should use it wisely. Tech debt isn't bad. It can be a tool to accelerate learning. Following the principles first build to learn, then to scale will have you diminish waste and double down on the winners. My take. First, you hack solutions for a small sample of your audience, and then you evaluate how the solution makes sense. Quickly, you learn that many solutions are incorrect, so you can adapt or drop them. But, for the ones that are worth investing in, you pay the debt off and create a scalable solution. Making drama out of tech debt contributes to complexity. I'm on a mission of simplifying what others complicate. What about you?

Tech debt in a dynamic business environment is unavoidable. In the words of Ward TD happens for 2 reasons Wrong Design — Team designs a solution that doesn't properly fit business needs. Requirements may still be met on the surface, but not so much under the hood. Rapid Evolution —This is unavoidable, we built the right thing, but the landscape changed so quickly and made it obsolete. Today's application is tomorrow's legacy.. Don't avoid but have continuous improvement strategy : A) Keep 1 or 2 sprint/quarter just to improve tech debts before it becomes a headache for any new engineers to understand and work on it B) Don't rush...planning for future extensibility while developing will give you a huge leverage later.

Let's not give technical debt a negative connotation! The optimal way to build a product is in small increments, and it is natural for some design decisions and implementation to get a higher weightage. The others will have to be added to the backlog and pursued in future product increments. Trying to do all at once will prove to be a disaster and a delayed product launch means late feedback from users.

Technical debt is an unavoidable aspect of software development. It can be present even in newly created products. Therefore, it's crucial for Product Managers to consistently allocate time to address backlog items aimed at resolving technical debt issues. Not doing so will lead to the accumulation of more technical debt, which can have negative consequences. One major consequence is a significant increase in the time required for developing new features. While it might initially feel satisfying to overlook technical debt and focus on exciting projects, eventually, it will catch up with you inevitably. :)

Accept it - you can't avoid technical debt. But you can tackle it with the right partnership! ?? As PMs, we need our engineering leaders to constantly surface debt risks. In turn, we must collaborate to allocate tech debt sprints in roadmaps. Together (PM + EM), we can: ? Realistically estimate pay-down costs ? Validate approaches to incrementally address debt ? Make tradeoffs transparent to stakeholders A PM succeeds when tech debt is a shared priority with engineering, not an afterthought. ?

Avoiding technical debt is impossible. Sooner or later the product becomes difficult to manage with a large debt and it spoils the business. In my opinion, one of the best ways is to build 10-20% technical debt into each sprint. But this figure will still depend on the speed of incoming technical debt.

In most cases, technical debt inevitably accumulates during the development process, but addressing it promptly is key. Prioritizing new features and bug fixes is tempting, but neglecting debt leads to complexity, longer development, and reduced innovation. Making time for debt reduction ensures sustainable growth, faster adaptation, and cost savings while improving developer morale and customer satisfaction. In the fast-paced tech world, though technical debt is often unavoidable, timely attention is the key to long-term success.