Design a Technical Debt Management System
As an Engineering Manager, design a system to identify, prioritize, and systematically address technical debt across your organization.
Implement debt tracking with business impact scoring, allocate capacity for debt reduction, and create visibility dashboards.
How do you make debt visible to non-technical stakeholders?
Consider how to get budget for debt reduction
Think about preventing new debt accumulation
Engineering Managers must balance feature delivery with technical health, making debt visible to stakeholders.
tools
- •JIRA epic/labels
- •Custom tracking app
- •Code annotations
attributes
- •Description
- •Impact (1-5)
- •Effort (1-5)
- •Risk if not addressed
- •Related systems
- •Owner
review cadence
Quarterly debt review meetings
approaches
- •Fixed percentage (20%)
- •Dedicated sprints
- •Boy Scout rule
- •Debt sprints quarterly
communication
Frame as investment in velocity, not overhead
types
- •Code debt
- •Architecture debt
- •Infrastructure debt
- •Documentation debt
- •Test debt
sources
- •Deliberate shortcuts
- •Outdated dependencies
- •Evolved requirements
- •Knowledge gaps
lagging
- •Incident rate
- •Time spent on maintenance
- •Developer satisfaction
leading
- •Code coverage
- •Dependency freshness
- •Build time
- •Deployment frequency
visibility
Dashboard for leadership showing debt trend
framing
Connect debt to business outcomes (velocity, reliability, risk)
regular updates
Include in sprint reviews and quarterly planning
factors
- •Business impact
- •Developer productivity impact
- •Security/compliance risk
- •Effort to fix
scoring
Weighted matrix: (Impact × Risk) / Effort
quick wins
Low effort, high impact items