Tech debt isn’t an ‘IT issue.’ It’s a business strategy problem.
This article appeared in Fast Company’s “Ask the Experts” section on 21 August 2025. Read the excerpt below, and please click through for the full text.
Every CEO knows the feeling of promised features taking months longer than expected, simple changes breaking unrelated systems, and top engineers fighting fires more than they build the future. Welcome to technical debt: the detritus of yesterday’s innovation that increasingly blocks progress today.
The crucial reality is that tech debt isn’t an “IT issue”; it’s a business strategy problem that directly impacts your bottom line, competitive positioning, and organizational resilience. Left unmanaged, tech debt will quietly erode your margins, reduce your velocity, increase your fragility, and throttle your growth.
THE EXECUTIVE BLIND SPOT
When your product team promises a “quick” integration with a new partner, but it takes six months because legacy systems can’t handle the load, or customer support tickets spike after rushed features create cascading bugs—those aren’t engineering failures, they’re consequences of business decisions.