Matt Greenberg is the CTO at Reforge, former VP Engineering at Credit Karma, and co-creator of the Scaling Product Delivery program. Keya Patel is an

Tech debt is not a burden, it's a strategic lever for success

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2021-06-15 23:30:07

Matt Greenberg is the CTO at Reforge, former VP Engineering at Credit Karma, and co-creator of the Scaling Product Delivery program.

Keya Patel is an Operator in Residence at Reforge, former Director of Product Growth at Headspace, and Growth & Monetization PM at Dropbox.

With contributions from Casey Winters (CPO at Eventbrite), Fareed Mosavat (VP Programs at Reforge, ex Dir Product at Slack) and Zainab Ghadiyali (past Reforge OIR, ex-Head of Product at Airbnb).

One of the most common points of tension between product and engineering is prioritizing technical debt. Why, when, and how to handle tech debt can be particular challenging questions for an organization and individual teams. Common questions we hear include:

How can I convince the leadership team to invest in working through tech debt, when they don't even understand our tech stack?

Many of these common questions stem from the belief that tech debt should be as low as possible and close to zero. But, companies and products never win by having as little as possible tech debt. Speed to delivery, being first to market, and constantly adding value to the product are things that lead to winning. And, most tech debt can make sense to accumulate as a tradeoff in order to get more of the things that lead to winning.