Your Velocity Is Dropping—Here’s Why
How tech and design debt are hurting your product and brand, and how to fix it.
Startups must operate at top speed, relentlessly pushing their capabilities to secure product-market fit and outpace the competition. They’re in a continuous race to launch products and rapidly acquire users, which quickly shifts to a focus on activation and growth. Unlike established companies, startups often function in short, intense sprints, aiming to hit critical metrics as soon as possible. However, this rapid pace can lead to a significant accumulation of tech and design debt.
This debt can arise from rushed releases, lack of refactoring, evolving or changing requirements, lack of documentation or guidelines, lack of a design system, or simply the need to deliver features faster than is ideal. Over time, these small decisions can snowball, creating a burden that slows engineering, hinders innovation, and complicates future work.
Are you facing frequent delays, high turnover, and rising bugs? You might have a debt problem.
Signs you have a debt problem
Frequent delays and missed deadlines
One of the most obvious signs that debt impacts velocity is when projects are consistently delayed and deadlines are missed. Teams may find themselves constantly firefighting, with little time left for planned work, leading to a perpetual state of catch-up.
High turnover or burnout
A work environment burdened by debt is often frustrating and stressful. Team members may feel demotivated by the constant struggle to overcome past decisions or mistakes, leading to burnout and higher turnover rates. This struggle not only affects the team’s morale but also further decreases velocity as new hires need time to get up to speed.
Increased bugs, outages, and complaints
As debt accumulates, the quality of the product declines. Bugs become more frequent, and customer complaints rise. This clearly indicates that debt hinders the team’s ability to deliver a stable and satisfying product, requiring more resources to be diverted to fixing issues rather than building new features.
From fragile systems to frustrated users
High maintenance costs
Tech debt diverts resources to maintenance, stifling innovation and making it harder to evolve the product.
Critical failures and bugs
Accumulated tech debt makes systems fragile, leading to unexpected failures that halt progress and drain resources.
Inconsistent experiences
Design debt causes inconsistent UI patterns and poor UX, confusing users, increasing support tickets, and slowing progress on new initiatives.
Reduced Agility
Design debt reduces the team’s ability to iterate quickly, forcing them to address past issues instead of innovating.
Impact on Brand Perception
Tech and design debt can damage a brand’s reputation, leading to user frustration, loss of trust, and a decline in revenue.
Debt’s vicious cycle
Tech and design debt often exacerbate each other. Poor design decisions can lead to complex or customized code, which in turn makes it harder to implement design improvements. Conversely, a messy codebase can limit the design team’s ability to execute their vision, creating a vicious cycle that becomes harder to break over time.
Debt in both tech and design creates friction in cross-functional teams. Engineers and designers may find it difficult to collaborate effectively, as both are dealing with the limitations imposed by their respective debts. This friction can lead to miscommunication, delays, and a further slowdown in velocity.
Strategies for addressing debt
Prioritization
To address debt effectively, it must be included in the roadmap. Prioritizing debt repayment alongside feature development ensures that it is not ignored and that the team can gradually reduce its impact without sacrificing too much velocity. This approach requires careful planning and a clear understanding of the debt’s impact on the product and the team.
Refactoring as you go
Encouraging a culture of continuous improvement can help manage debt more effectively. By incorporating refactoring into the regular engineering process, teams can address tech debt incrementally. This prevents it from accumulating to a point where it becomes overwhelming and ensures that the codebase remains healthy and adaptable.
Design System implementation
A well-implemented design system can significantly reduce design debt by promoting consistency and reusability, offering a shared language and set of components that help maintain a coherent user experience across the product. However, a design system is not a magic fix—if significant debt has already accumulated, it will fail without first addressing the existing issues. The success of a design system depends on resolving past debt to ensure a solid foundation for future improvements.
Cross-functional collaboration
Enhancing communication and collaboration between design, engineering, and product teams is crucial for managing debt. Regular cross-functional meetings, shared documentation, and a mutual understanding of the debt’s impact can help align efforts to reduce debt and improve velocity. However, if only a few teams commit to this approach, it won’t be enough to change the culture. It requires a unified effort across the organization. By working together, all teams can effectively identify and address debt, preventing it from becoming a bottleneck and driving meaningful, lasting change.
My experiences
Throughout my startup, enterprise, and consultancy career, I have seen firsthand how different companies handle debt. Some organizations bring in outside resources specifically to address tech and design debt, ensuring that the internal teams can maintain their current velocity and commitments. Other organizations implement company-wide sprints each quarter and tie performance metrics to debt reduction, driving positive behaviors that stabilize both the velocity and the codebase. Unfortunately, I’ve also encountered companies that neglect their debt, leading to the very issues outlined above. Without strong executive leadership support, these companies continue to build on a poor foundation, often wondering why, despite hiring more resources, their velocity continues to decline.
Balancing debt and velocity
Debt as a strategic decision
Some level of debt is inevitable in product development. The key is to manage it strategically, recognizing when it’s worth taking on debt for a short-term gain and when it’s necessary to repay it to ensure long-term success.
Build debt reduction into processes
Regularly assess and address your debt to maintain your team’s velocity and the quality of your product. By embedding debt management into your processes and culture, you can prevent it from crippling your progress and instead use it as a tool to drive sustainable growth and innovation.