"Technical debt is blocking product development"
Lemur Media · author: Dominik Dębski · updated 28.10.2026
Technical debt becomes a board issue when most team capacity goes on maintenance and workarounds, and every change takes several times longer than at competitors. The solution is to price the debt in time and money, set a fixed budget for paying it down, and tie architecture decisions to business goals.
What are the symptoms?
- Simple product changes take weeks of work and coordination across several teams.
- Production releases are infrequent and often end in an outage or a rollback.
- Technology teams are growing, while the number of changes delivered stays the same.
- Parts of the system are understood by only one or two people, and they decide the timelines.
What are the causes?
- 01Deferred repaymentFor years, feature deadlines won out over quality, without a conscious decision about the cost of that trade-off.
- 02No language for the boardDebt is described in technical terms, so the board cannot weigh it against investment in new features.
- 03Architecture from a different stageA system designed for one market and one product now supports several business lines.
| Headcount | Typical picture |
|---|---|
| 50–249 employees | A monolith built by the first team slows down every initiative, and its authors have often already left. |
| 250–999 employees | Several generations of systems run in parallel, and migrations started years ago have never been completed. |
What questions should the board ask?
- What share of technology team capacity goes on maintenance and fixes today?
- How long does a small change take from decision to production?
- Which business initiatives have been postponed or abandoned because of technology constraints?
Which metrics should you check?
- Lead time for changes and deployment frequency, per DORA metrics
- Share of changes ending in an outage or rollback (change failure rate)
- Share of team capacity spent on maintenance and debt compared with new features
Which mistakes should you avoid?
- Rewriting the whole system from scratch as a single multi-year project.
- Paying down debt without linking it to the areas that block business goals.
- Hiding debt work in estimates for new features.
How does the solution work?
Methods: Operating model. Lemur Compass sets the sequence of actions based on the company's growth phase, scale, business model and profitability.
- 01Debt mapSystem areas are inventoried by maintenance cost, outage risk and impact on planned initiatives.
- 02Pricing in the board's languageEach area of debt gets an estimate of the cost of delay in months of work and lost revenue.
- 03Fixed repayment budgetThe board approves a fixed share of capacity for debt, e.g. 20–30%, reviewed quarterly.
- 04Incremental modernisationSystems are replaced piece by piece, starting with the areas that block the most important goals.
Where should you start?
Review of technology and debt from a business perspective (3–4 weeks).