Debts, Tech and Otherwise

Debts, Tech and Otherwise While people debate the validity of "tech debt", others are asking, "What other sorts of 'debt' do we have in software development and delivery?" 09 March 2025 tl;dr A colleague of mine, Scott Porad (CTO, VP Engineering) posted on LinkedIn, asking, "What are all the other kinds of debt like tech debt?" He listed out a few, then asked for others to weigh in, and the list grew... kinda long. And interesting. And made me think about the metaphor more deeply. His list included financial debt (the OG), Product debt (gaps in the product that impact revenue or lead to support costs), Ops Debt (manual processes performed by the operations team because the software doesn't support the processes), Process Debt (valuable steps of the software development process that are skipped causing quality or velocity issues), and Org Debt (key roles that are not staffed that cause quality or velocity issues). He then asked others to weigh in with their favorites, and the answer ... Read full article.