Products can accumulate "technical debt" in the same way that a company might accumulate "financial debt". This occurs when judgments about architecture, technology, and coding are made that are incorrect or suboptimal. As a result, the design might not be as loosely connected as it should be, and the code might be cluttered instead of tidy. This article outlines why product managers should be concerned about technical debt and provides solutions for dealing with it.
Why Is Technical Debt Important for Product Managers? You may not be concerned about how clean and well-structured the code is as the person in charge of the product. However, the quality of your goods is crucial. It has a direct impact on your capacity to meet strategic product goals and create successful products. Technical debt makes it difficult to try out new ideas, roll out new features, and respond promptly to customer input. The more complicated the code and the less modular the architecture, the more time and money it takes to update your product. In the worst-case scenario, you'll have to go through a rewriting process in which some or all of your product is redesigned. This is analogous to financial debt in that if the debt is not paid back, the interest payments will compound and eventually bankrupt the company. Your Product and Technical Debt Talk to the development team, for example, at the next sprint retrospective, to figure out if and how much your product is affected by technical debt. I've found that members of the development team usually have a decent sense of where issues in the architecture and code are. Consider asking the team to gather data that demonstrates how much technical debt there is, where it is situated, and how terrible it is, such as code complexity, dependencies, duplication, and test coverage as indicators. A number of code analysis tools are available that collect the necessary data and indicate how adaptive and clean the design is. Once you've determined the amount and severity of tech debt in your product, work with the development team to assess its influence on reaching product goals and achieving product success.
Consider the cost of delay or the cost of not addressing technical debt today but deferring it to a later date. Should you, for example, keep adding new features to the product for the next six months and then devote more time to technical improvements? Is it advisable to deal with the most serious debt first? Also, think about where your product is in its life cycle. New and young products are particularly vulnerable to technical debt. Experimenting with new ideas and adjusting the product to user feedback and new trends will be difficult and time-consuming if your product has a tightly linked architecture with many dependencies, if it lacks (automated) tests and documentation, or if it is full of spaghetti code. Similarly, if you wish to extend the product's life cycle, you may need to first eliminate (some) technical debt before making the necessary changes and adding new features or creating a variant. However, launching a minimum viable product (MVP) with purposely degraded design, technology, and code in order to reduce time to market is a reasonable strategy—as long as the quality is sufficient enough to modify the product to early market input. However, use caution when implementing this strategy. You'll have to devote effort to resolving technical debt and laying robust technological foundations for your product. This should be done before you reach product-market fit since otherwise, scaling up and keeping your product growth will be difficult. If, on the other hand, your product is nearing maturity—or even decline—and you want to focus on maximizing the economic benefits it delivers rather than extending its life cycle, you'll probably want to conduct as little debt elimination effort as possible. Techniques for getting rid of technical debt once you've determined how much tech debt you have and how quickly you need to pay it off, you have two options: You can either devote time to a focused effort and spend a certain amount of time paying off the debt, or you can work on it while improving your product and adding new features. If you have a considerable amount of tech debt that is impeding your ability to innovate, you should set aside time to pay it off.
If the technical debt isn't as severe and doesn't need to be handled right away, schedule some debt removal in each sprint while continuing to improve the user experience and add or expand functionality. Add tech debt remediation items to the product backlog to accomplish this. This makes the required work visible and trackable across sprints and releases. Ensure, however, that the essential work is completed and that demands for additional functionality do not obstruct the reduction of technical debt.
Technical debt is frequently created unintentionally. The architecture and programming of digital products demand constant care. Otherwise, the quality of the product may decline, resulting in an increase in technical debt. This is similar to regularly repairing your bicycle, ideally after every ride. And the more you rely on your bike, the more you should take care of it, keep it clean, and repair or replace any broken parts. Making time for the essential clean-up and maintenance work and viewing it as a part of the bike riding experience rather than a chore is the problem. The same can be said about digital goods. Some teams are so harried and under pressure that they ignore good software, craftsmanship approaches like evolutionary architecture, test-driven development, pair programming, and continuous integration. These approaches, however, do more than just aid in the creation of adaptive architecture and a clean codebase. They will speed up development and allow you to release new features and functionality faster, not slower if used correctly—the latter being a typical misunderstanding among product people in my experience. The inverse is also true: if development teams do not use the appropriate processes and tools, the software will be brittle rather than soft and pliable. Give your development team time to learn, use, and improve the correct development processes if you want to avoid future technological debt.
Originally published on Prosple India