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Product Management vocabulary · Prioritization

Technical debt

Meaning in product management, with examples

nounCommon term

In product management, technical debt means: The future cost of shortcuts taken in code or design to deliver faster, which makes later changes slower and riskier until the team fixes them.

In Turkish: teknik borç

How it is used

Also called tech debt. Engineers raise it; PMs need to make room for it on the roadmap, often by reserving part of every sprint. Like financial debt, a little can be useful, but too much slows the whole team down.

Example sentences

  1. We're spending 20% of every sprint paying down technical debt in the billing system.

  2. This quick fix will add technical debt, so let's create a ticket to clean it up later.

Common collocations

  • pay down technical debt
  • tech debt
  • accumulate technical debt
  • reduce technical debt
  • trade-offA situation in which getting more of one thing means accepting less of another, such as releasing faster but with fewer features.
  • prioritizeTo decide which work is most important and should be done first, and therefore which work will wait or will not be done at all.
  • backlogAn ordered list of all the work a product team might do, such as features, improvements and bug fixes, with the most important items at the top.
  • sprintA fixed, short period, usually one to four weeks, in which a team builds and finishes an agreed set of work before planning the next one.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Prioritization

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