Technical Debt 101: Why It Matters and Where It Starts
If you’ve ever delayed cleaning up an outdated customization, left an unused automation in place, or built a quick workaround to meet a deadline, you’ve probably incurred technical debt.
And that’s okay—technical debt is a natural part of system growth. But left unmanaged, it quietly slows you down. In this post, we’ll define what technical debt really is, explain why it matters, and explore how it accumulates—even when no one’s done anything “wrong.”
What Is Technical Debt?
Technical debt is the cost of deferring improvements or cleanup in order to move faster in the short term. Like financial debt, it’s not inherently bad. Sometimes, it’s the right call to take a shortcut to meet a deadline or adapt to urgent business needs.
But those shortcuts come with a cost: the longer you delay addressing them, the harder and more expensive they become to fix.
Why It Matters
As technical debt grows, your systems become harder to change, slower to maintain, and more fragile. You might start noticing:
Increasing time to deliver new features
Confusing user interfaces with legacy elements still hanging around
Automations triggering at the wrong time—or failing silently
Integration breakdowns or duplicated logic across systems
Eventually, your systems start feeling like a patchwork of workarounds instead of a platform that supports your business goals.
Where It Starts: Five Common Paths to Technical Debt
Technical debt doesn’t just come from mistakes or poor planning. In fact, it often comes from reasonable decisions that made sense at the time. Here are five common ways it builds up over time:
1. Legacy Customizations That No Longer Make Sense
You adopted a tool 10 years ago and customized it to fit your needs. Over time, the platform evolved to support those processes natively—but your custom code is still in place, making things harder to maintain and less efficient than they could be.
2. Leftover Changes from Temporary Solutions
During the pandemic, you adapted quickly—adding new screens, fields, and automations to support remote work or emergency workflows. Those changes may no longer be needed, but they’re still active, cluttering up your UI and dragging down performance.
3. Siloed Development Over Time
You’ve improved your system through a series of projects, each focused on a specific goal. But over time, these one-off automations and configurations layer on top of each other. Without a unified design, the system becomes harder to understand and support.
4. Outgrowing the Tools of the Past
Your platform has grown with you, adding better, faster ways to build and automate. But if your team is still using older approaches year after year, you're missing opportunities to simplify and modernize—without necessarily doing more work.
5. Integration Decisions That Don’t Scale
You connected your systems using what you knew how to do at the time—direct API calls, nightly exports, hand-coded scripts. Now you have a fragile web of point-to-point connections. A more modern integration strategy using middleware could improve reliability, performance, and flexibility.
What’s Next
In future posts, we’ll dig deeper into how to recognize different types of technical debt, how to prioritize cleanup, and how to prevent unnecessary debt from accumulating in the future.
Technical debt isn’t something to be ashamed of. It’s something to manage. And the earlier you start, the easier it is to keep your systems healthy, responsive, and ready for what’s next.
