| April 15, 2025
Technical debt has been described in a lot of ways—a ticking time bomb, a hidden liability, a creeping rot under the surface of a product. The metaphor you choose doesn’t matter. What matters is this: if you don’t address it, tech debt will eventually slow you down, frustrate your engineers, and limit your company’s ability to scale.
The challenge is that tech debt is often invisible to people outside the engineering org. It doesn’t show up in dashboards or OKRs until it’s already causing delays or quality issues.
So how do you, as a technology leader, spot it early?
Here are three reliable signs that tech debt is accumulating—and what to do about it before it hurts your team.
1. Delivery Slows Down Even Though Headcount Doesn’t
One of the clearest warning signs of accumulating tech debt is a drop in team velocity that isn’t tied to team size or scope changes. You have the same number of engineers. They’re working hard. But progress feels sluggish. Features take longer to ship. Bugs pop up in places that used to be stable.
This isn’t always about poor performance or unclear priorities. More often, it means the team is spending increasing amounts of time working around fragile code, debugging inconsistent behavior, or avoiding areas of the codebase that are too risky to touch.
🚩 Watch For:
- More time spent on QA and regression testing
- Engineers frequently asking, “Who knows how this works?”
- Tickets that require days of investigation before work can even begin
✅ What to Do:
- Conduct a “friction audit”: Ask your teams what parts of the codebase they avoid and why.
- Look at cycle time and change failure rates in your delivery pipeline.
- Allocate capacity explicitly for tech debt reduction in each sprint.
2. Engineers Are Afraid to Make Changes
Psychological safety isn’t just about being able to speak freely. In engineering teams, it also shows up as confidence in making changes to the codebase.
If developers are afraid to touch certain systems, that’s a massive red flag. It means:
- The code is too complex, poorly documented, or fragile
- There’s no clear ownership or testing
- The cost of mistakes is high
The longer this goes unchecked, the more those areas calcify into black boxes that no one understands. You start building new features around the mess instead of through it. That compounds the problem.
🚩 Watch For:
- Pull requests that include comments like “I didn’t touch that part because I wasn’t sure what it does”
- Teams deferring features that require core code changes
- Engineers consistently lobbying to rewrite entire modules
✅ What to Do:
- Identify critical systems with low test coverage or unclear owners
- Prioritize documentation and pairing sessions in those areas
- Celebrate and reward engineers who take on refactors that reduce fear
3. “We Should Refactor This Someday” Becomes a Mantra
Every team has a list of things they wish they had time to clean up. But when “someday” never comes, that list becomes a mountain.
If engineers keep bringing up the same code smells, architectural flaws, or tool limitations in retro after retro, it’s not just venting. It’s an indicator of strategic risk. And when these conversations get ignored long enough, they stop happening altogether—which is even worse.
Recurring refactor requests are usually a sign that developers are fighting the system more than they’re building the product.
🚩 Watch For:
- Repeated retro themes around test setup, deployment pain, or flaky integrations
- Long onboarding times for new devs due to “tribal knowledge”
- Engineer burnout or churn in teams with the most architectural complexity
✅ What to Do:
- Add technical debt items to your roadmap—not just the backlog
- Track engineering satisfaction and cognitive load in regular surveys
- Give teams autonomy to fix the pain points they experience most
Bonus: Tech Debt Isn’t Just Code
We often think about tech debt as messy code or outdated frameworks. But it also lives in your architecture, tooling, and processes:
- Architecture Debt: Microservices that no longer serve their original purpose, or tightly coupled systems that block scale.
- Tooling Debt: Scripts that only one engineer knows how to run, or deployment pipelines that fail unpredictably.
- Process Debt: Manual QA processes, unclear ticket grooming, or undocumented tribal knowledge.
All of these contribute to drag. And all of them can be addressed.
Tech Debt Is a Leadership Responsibility
It’s easy to treat technical debt as a developer issue. But it’s not.
It’s a leadership issue.
Tech debt is a natural part of every growing organization. You can’t eliminate it entirely. But you can choose whether you manage it intentionally or let it manage you.
- Spot it early
- Talk about it openly
- Allocate time to pay it down
- Track it like real work
When tech debt is treated as a strategic consideration—not an afterthought—your team moves faster, delivers more, and burns out less.
That’s your job as a leader. Don’t wait for it to become urgent. Spot it before it hurts you.
