A Taxonomy of Technical Debt
I am a senior product manager for a large financial technology company.<p>Over the years I have learnt to become comfortable with allowing my engineering teams to refactor code whilst delivering new functionality.<p>This has been a process and largely one of trust between me and the engineering leads.<p>It has also helped that I have seen payback from the investment made from reducing down the debt in terms of us delivering new functionality quicker and less error prone code. Although, this payback can take a while to see (6months + which is a long time for a product person operating in a competitive space!)<p>Most of my managers don't get this or if they do they are too blinded by immediate kpi's from further above they can't justify it so in most cases I just tell the engineering guys to add a spread to their estimates to cover the paydown of the debt.<p>Over they years this has definitely helped me build tighter relationships with engineers which as any product manager knows can have huge benefits.