What are your strategies for demonstrating the value of technical debt reduction quickly? Do you prioritize short-term, high-impact projects to build early wins?
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Focus on two key factors: audience and context. For the audience, tailor your approach based on who you’re speaking to. If it’s upper stakeholders, share past horror stories—times when unresolved technical debt caused system outages, delayed critical launches, or drove up costs. Highlight how addressing it now saves money and prevents future crises. If it’s developers, connect it to their day-to-day frustrations like slow builds, clunky workflows, or constant bug fixes, and show how reducing debt will make their work smoother and more rewarding. For product managers or owners, focus on how fewer bugs and cleaner systems lead to faster delivery, increased flexibility, and happier customers.
Context is just as important. Not all systems are created equal, and the stakes differ. Reducing technical debt in a bank’s core system might prevent catastrophic failures while doing the same for a short-term marketing landing page might be unnecessary. In some cases, technical debt is even intentional, such as during rapid prototyping. However, for long-lived systems that multiple teams maintain over time, excessive debt can become a crippling bottleneck, slowing progress and increasing costs. By addressing both audience and context, you can position technical debt reduction as a strategic, high-impact investment.
For organizations lacking technical debt awareness, focus on quick wins and reliable, frequent software delivery.
Engineering leaders must also effectively communicate the business impact of technical debt using relevant metrics, showcasing how addressing it streamlines progress toward organizational goals.
Very good Question and one we were just contemplating ourselves. In addition, we are considering how to even assign value to tech debt items to show how completing them actually provides value (basically how to measure it - and I welcome anyone's thoughts on that!)
To your point around strategy, our approach is: we built out an entire backlog (catalog) of tech debt items across our systems (probably 75% complete in all reality). We then bucketed them into items that would have direct cost impact (example: reduce direct costs by consolidating servers or applications and reducing spend), Items that have High risk impact (Example old frameworks with security risks), and then ones that could create operational efficiency (Creates bad data, inefficient, duplicative to other tech, etc). We also developed an overall ranking process that uses simple and fairly subjective measures such as Implementation Complexity, additional costs needed to resolve, size of the debt in terms of LOE, and the relative cost of inaction.
We then decided to attack the direct cost ones first as a means to show the tangible impact by investing time and money on tech debt. From there, we'll use the ranking process to drive priority and attempt to measure the impact on either ticket reduction, improved security scan scores, productivity, or even reduction on complexity (Data and/or systems). This last part is still very much a work in progress (as is all of this really - so don't feel alone if you are struggling with this).
Background for our teams is project centric work (We haven't yet adopted a product driven mentality), generally working iteratively within a waterfall style approach to projects. Our general constraints on the Iron Triangle are Budget & Time, so scope has to be negotiated (hence the creation of tech debt).
One last point - on newer projects, we are attempting to pull tech debt in as a part of the project work to try and keep newer development from adding too much to the debt pile. See point above about the Iron Triangle, however, to understand it still happens.
Most of our work is project-based, so its easy to show value through project success.
However, operational processes (e.g. increased productivity, improved user experience, etc) can also be used to show value and motivate for additional investments.
To make the impact of reducing technical debt clear, I focus on quick, high-value fixes that immediately improve system stability and help developers move faster. My approach is to tackle the most frustrating issues first—things like slow build times, unreliable deployments, or recurring bugs that drain productivity.
For example, I’ve worked with teams where flaky tests kept causing unnecessary failures, delaying releases. Addressing those first didn’t just make the pipeline more reliable; it also gave developers more confidence in their work. I prefer an incremental approach—rather than large-scale overhauls, I integrate debt reduction into everyday development. This way, improvements happen alongside new features, so it feels like a natural part of the process rather than a disruptive initiative.
I also actively check in with users—whether it’s developers working in the codebase or end-users experiencing performance issues—to get feedback on what’s most painful. That helps prioritize changes that have an immediate impact. Measurable improvements like faster releases, fewer production issues, and a smoother user experience make it easy to demonstrate value. And once teams start seeing those benefits, it’s much easier to keep the momentum going.