Technical Debt
Technical debt refers to the technical shortcuts taken to ship faster (duplicated code, missing tests, an architecture that no longer fits the current scale), which, like financial debt, accrue "interest": every new feature becomes slower and riskier to build.
A startup shipping an MVP in three months almost always accumulates technical debt, and that's often the right call to validate a market quickly. The problem shows up a year or two later, when the team spends more time fixing regressions and working around fragile code than shipping new features. That's when a code audit becomes useful: it quantifies the debt and separates what's actually blocking the roadmap from what can wait.
The most common mistake is letting debt pile up without ever measuring it or making it visible to non-technical decision-makers: it ends up slowing down the whole roadmap without anyone understanding why timelines keep slipping. The better approach is to document it as it accrues and set aside a fixed share of every sprint to pay it down, instead of waiting for a crisis to act.
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