There’s a version of technical debt that gets talked about often: shortcuts, quick fixes, cutting corners in the name of speed. If you read my earlier piece on this, you’ll remember how my husband tends to approach those decisions. His instinct is to slow down and build something that actually holds, even when that feels inefficient in the moment.
That framing still matters. But I’ve been noticing something slightly different lately, especially in the teams I work with.
Most high performers aren’t creating technical debt because they don’t know better. They’re doing it with full awareness. The hire that isn’t quite right…but fills a gap. The process that’s clunky…but functional enough. The follow-up system that isn’t where it should be…but still produces some results.
In the moment, those decisions are easy to justify. Nothing stalls out totally, really. And revenue continues to come in. From the outside, it often looks indistinguishable from progress. Where it starts to surface is later, and not in a way that immediately demands attention. Work that used to move quickly begins to drag. People need more direction than they once did. Problems that felt resolved show up again, just in slightly different forms.
There isn’t a single point where something breaks. It’s more of a shift in how the business feels to operate. What used to run with some degree of ease starts requiring more involvement. You’ll notice that more decisions sit with the leader of the organization, and that there’s less room to step away without something slipping.
That’s the cost.
It’s not a total collapse, but a gradual tightening. The business still functions, but it asks more of you to keep it that way. Because production hasn’t stopped, it’s easy to overlook. The numbers don’t immediately reflect the strain, so the underlying issues stay in place longer than they should.
Eventually, though, you feel it. It’s not a dramatic failure, but it is a noticeable weight. It’s this sense that everything is just a little harder than it used to be.
If you’re trying to get a handle on it, the simplest place to start is to look for anything in your business that feels heavier than it should. Not broken, exactly, just inefficient, unclear, or overly dependent on you. Those are usually the places where something was patched instead of built.
Paying that down rarely feels efficient in the short term. It means stopping, pulling something apart, and rebuilding it in a way that better supports where you’re headed. For someone wired to move quickly (looking at you, leaders), that can feel counterintuitive. Like you’re interrupting momentum at the exact moment you should be leaning into it. But that tension is usually the signal.
Every business carries some level of technical debt. The question is whether it’s being managed with intention, or allowed to accumulate because things are still working.
Because they usually are – just not as cleanly as they could be.