Technical debt

Also called Tech debt, Legacy system

The accumulated cost of shortcuts taken to ship sooner. Real, and it charges interest.

What it means

Technical debt is the future cost created by choosing a quicker solution now over a better one. Like financial debt, it is not automatically bad — borrowing to reach a market first can be the right call — but it accrues interest in the form of slower work later.

Legacy systems are usually accumulated debt that was never repaid.

Why it matters

It shows up commercially long before anyone names it: changes take longer than they used to, small requests turn into large projects, and nobody wants to touch a particular part of the system.

For a business considering a sale, an undocumented system that one person understands reduces the valuation and complicates due diligence.

What it looks like in practice

Make it visible. A short list of the known shortcuts and what each is costing turns an engineering complaint into a business decision.

Budget for it — a proportion of development capacity, continuously, rather than an occasional rewrite.

Distinguish deliberate debt taken for a reason from accidental debt from not knowing better. They need different responses.

What to watch out for

The full rewrite, which is the most common and most expensive answer and frequently produces a new system with the same problems and none of the old one's hard-won corrections.

Debt concentrated in one person's head, which is a business continuity risk as much as a technical one.

Where to get proper advice

An independent technical review, from someone with no stake in either the existing system or replacing it.