Your team is divided on addressing technical debt. How can you unify everyone towards a common solution?

As a product manager, I address technical debt by ensuring the team understands its long-term impact, such as slowed development, increased bugs, and higher costs. I foster a shared understanding of these consequences through clear communication and regular discussions, aligning the team towards prioritizing and managing technical debt effectively.

According to my work experience, Technical debt accumulates when shortcuts are taken during development, often to meet deadlines. Just like financial debt, it can compound over time, making future changes more difficult and expensive. As a product head, I ensure everyone on the team understands the implications of technical debt. I explain how it can slow down future development, increase the risk of bugs, and ultimately cost more in the long run. A shared understanding of these impacts is the first step toward a common solution, aligning the team on the importance of addressing technical debt.

Based on my experience, it's acceptable to have a reasonable amount of technical debt as long as your product functions well and the issues are minor. But it's crucial to take quick action if the debt noticeably affects your ability to deliver or restricts access to new tools, like libraries in updated software versions. It's important to prioritize which aspects of the debt to tackle based on their impact on performance and delivery ???

Once we've assessed the impact of our technical debt, the next step is to prioritize which debts to address first. This prioritization needs to be strategic, focusing on areas that will provide the most benefit to our product's performance and maintainability. I encourage the team to consider both the user experience and the potential for future development when deciding what to tackle first. By creating a shared prioritization, we can prevent the paralysis that comes from facing a mountain of debt without a clear starting point, ensuring we make impactful progress.

When dealing with technical debt, I include specific tasks related to it in each sprint. These tasks usually make up about 10-15% of our team's work during routine development phases. However, if technical debt starts noticeably affecting our performance, like slowing down important user features, we focus more on addressing it. For example, when slow message delivery affected user experience in one of my products, we dedicated an entire sprint to fixing this issue, which significantly improved our performance. My main approach is to ensure that we balance our efforts across technical debt, feature development, and bug fixes, while maintaining progress and product quality ??

Treat tech debt with the same fervor as deferred bugs. It can be argued that tech debt are bugs waiting to happen. Create a separate backlog or club them with bugs to understand their impact and priority. The more it’s visible the more traction you get on it. Also add a section to your reports classifying tech debt as a separate KPI.

Product teams are very receptive upon new technology adoptions, new flow creations/ updations and technology shifts. Use each of those opportunities to raise tech debt and get them prioritized, scheduled and funded.

Being a Product Savvy, need to stay flexible with our strategies for managing technical debt as our product and team grow. What works today might not work tomorrow. I encourage us to keep talking about the best ways to handle technical debt and be open to trying new approaches or tools that could make the process easier. By being adaptable, we can stay unified and ready to tackle the ever-changing technical challenges we face.