The two-minute version
Technical debt is the one liability most organisations carry without a ledger — discussed
as a feeling, managed as an exception. The webinar's case: debt is a normal financial
instrument of product development, only dangerous when nobody records the terms. Three moves
turn it into a managed portfolio:
- Make it visible. A debt registry run like a risk register — named owners, explicit decisions — beats a backlog label: a backlog is where debt goes to be forgotten.
- Price it. Every item has a principal (cost to fix) and interest (what you pay every month you don't). Measure the interest first — you are already paying it.
- Decide deliberately. Debt taken knowingly, with a recorded trade-off and a revisit trigger, is leverage. Debt nobody chose is the kind that compounds.
- One-off “refactoring sprints” fail structurally: a recurring liability needs a budget line, not a special occasion.
- In product families the payoff is direct: in one radio family, platform discipline held roughly 95% of the software common across 10+ variants.