Understand the true risk of technical debt in your business

Technical debt poses significant business risks, reducing agility, slowing innovation, and causing lost opportunities. Addressing it is crucial for long-term organisational success.

Published on 24 April 2025

Written by Martin Hinshelwood

1 minute read

https://nkdagility.com/resources/SLaqpu5BHH8

If your business truly understood the risk of technical debt, you wouldn’t accept any of it.

There’s a myth that “some level of technical debt is manageable.” But let’s be clear—technical debt is 100% risk. It’s an unhedged fund with no asset securing it, no insurance to mitigate it. The cost isn’t just in future refactoring; it’s in lost time, lost agility, and lost opportunities.

At Microsoft, TFS was delivered on a two-year cycle. By 2012, with 600 engineers, they were shipping just 24 features a year. Technical debt had turned a powerhouse into a bottleneck. It wasn’t until they embraced 3-week Sprints and tackled the underlying debt that they regained agility.

This isn’t just an engineering problem. It’s a business problem. If you think you can hide technical debt in a cost centre forever, think again.

How does your organisation treat technical debt? As a calculated risk or an unrecognised liability?

Also published on: LinkedIn

Technical Debt

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