Product managers can keep the roadmap healthy by treating tech debt and architectural work like any other feature, using prioritisation, dashboards and shared roadmaps to avoid hidden slowdown.
Product managers must treat technical debt and architectural improvements as first-class work, not an afterthought. By giving them the same visibility and prioritisation as feature work, you stop hidden slowdown from choking the roadmap. The article shows how a simple habit of mapping debt on a board with context and provisional ranking lets you see which fixes have real user impact and which are cosmetic. The first step is to surface debt through code reviews, performance metrics or user research and then plot each item on a shared visual like a Miro board. Give a one-sentence context, rank them provisionally, and flag any hard deadlines. Once listed, weigh each against current objectives; a latency issue that frustrates users jumps ahead of a nice-to-have UI tweak. Regular cadence keeps debt visible: a fortnightly sync with the tech lead, a weekly performance dashboard, or dedicating a fixed percentage of capacity to debt work. Building a lightweight technical roadmap and publishing it to stakeholders creates transparency, while Service Level Indicators and error budgets translate the cost of debt into customer-facing metrics that anyone can understand. When debt is measured and communicated, teams avoid surprise regressions, maintain reliability, and earn stakeholder trust. The result is a product that can ship new features quickly without accumulating a hidden liability, giving engineering and product leaders the confidence to plan at scale.
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