It’s one of those systemic health type things. It’s really hard to die of tech debt on its own, but if you move slower, you’ll die more often from other shocks.
Another way of thinking about it is that you have N months of runway, and based on your velocity you can pull off a pivot in M months, and the more tech debt, the more time it will take to successfully pivot. If you don’t have a full pivot worth of runway remaining, and you need to pivot, you die. (Of course this oversimplifies by holding pivot magnitude equal but hopefully this illustrates the point.)
I do agree that away from the margin, companies that are incredibly successful can afford to punt harder on tech debt. I suppose “know thyself” might be useful advice here; it’s probably not good advice for the median startup to ignore tech debt completely IMO.
I think the main point though is to optimize for agility; tech debt can let you move faster in the short and even medium term, so sometimes it’s right to tactically take on some debt. But not so much that you get bogged down later; make sure you carve out time to fix the stuff that starts to be painful.
Another way of thinking about it is that you have N months of runway, and based on your velocity you can pull off a pivot in M months, and the more tech debt, the more time it will take to successfully pivot. If you don’t have a full pivot worth of runway remaining, and you need to pivot, you die. (Of course this oversimplifies by holding pivot magnitude equal but hopefully this illustrates the point.)
I do agree that away from the margin, companies that are incredibly successful can afford to punt harder on tech debt. I suppose “know thyself” might be useful advice here; it’s probably not good advice for the median startup to ignore tech debt completely IMO.
I think the main point though is to optimize for agility; tech debt can let you move faster in the short and even medium term, so sometimes it’s right to tactically take on some debt. But not so much that you get bogged down later; make sure you carve out time to fix the stuff that starts to be painful.