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Don’t Worry About All That Tech Debt

It’s not actually slowing you down

Avi Siegel
Entrepreneurship Handbook
7 min readNov 4, 2024

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Photo by Kostiantyn Li on Unsplash

Let’s step into one of your eng team’s “architecture sync” meetings together.

I’m sure there’s a running doc of all the work that needs to be done to get the codebase to an “acceptable” state.

The meeting gets underway, and someone pulls up that doc. The team did their job prepping for the meeting, and there are some fresh updates to show for it — three new items added to the ever-expanding bullet list.

Taken all together, the list probably represents a good two years of work. And that’s if you completely halted movement on every other initiative.

Clearly it’s unrealistic to do it all. Also clearly, all these items must not be that important, else the system would have already imploded.

Yet, the team echoes the same tired refrain.

“If we don’t fix this now, we’re doomed!

[Note: “doomed” may be replaced with more colorful language.]

Look, here’s the reality that most engineering teams don’t want to face: your tech debt probably isn’t the crisis you think it is. While you’re spending months polishing code that’s already doing its job, your competitors are shipping features and stealing your…

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Published in Entrepreneurship Handbook

How to succeed in entrepreneurship; feat. founder stories, design articles, and startup deep dives that inspire your entrepreneurial journey.

Written by Avi Siegel

Applying real-world perspective to product management, leadership, agile, entrepreneurship, and startups. Co-Founder of Momentum (gainmomentum.ai)

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