Unlocking high software engineering pace: Partner with Product to pay down technical debt

The piece argues that technical debt stops being a siloed engineering problem when you surface it to product leadership and tie it to concrete business metrics. By cataloguing debt quarterly and tracking incidents, delivery time, and defect rates, you create data that product can use in planning discussions.

The author stresses building a give-and-take relationship with product managers. When product proposes a feature in a painful area of the codebase, you frame the work as a joint investment: two weeks of cleanup can shave six weeks off the next three features, or extracting a legacy service into its own microservice unlocks new public endpoints. Those concrete trade-offs turn debt into a shared business priority instead of a vague engineering wish list.

Finally, the approach focuses on debt that blocks performance, quality, or speed. Like a fallen tree on a trail, you clear only the obstacles that directly impede delivery and document the rest. The result is a culture where product factors code health into roadmaps, engineers feel empowered to propose fixes, and the team consistently delivers faster, more reliable software.