As a product manager, you’re constantly juggling competing priorities. On one hand, there’s the demand for new features to keep your product competitive and meet customer expectations. On the other, there’s the often less glamorous—but equally important—task of managing technical debt. For product managers, technical debt can feel like a never-ending weight pulling the team away from exciting new features, but it’s something that can’t be ignored without consequences.

Technical debt refers to the shortcuts or compromises in the development process that lead to long-term inefficiencies in your product’s codebase. While some technical debt is inevitable, unmanaged technical debt can lead to slower development cycles, more bugs, and higher maintenance costs down the line. Balancing the need for new features with managing technical debt is crucial to ensuring your product’s long-term health and success.

Let’s explore technical debt and why it’s important to manage it. We will also provide strategies on how you, as a product manager, can balance feature development with addressing technical debt.

What is Technical Debt?

Technical debt happens when engineers take shortcuts or make decisions that speed up development in the short term but create problems for future development. It’s a bit like borrowing money: you get an immediate benefit, but you have to pay it back later—with interest.

There are a few reasons technical debt builds up:

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