It's remarkably easy for product managers to focus on immediate value delivery and unintentionally create pressure that leads to technical debt. The business wants features, stakeholders want results, and the path of least resistance is often the path that accumulates the most hidden cost. But the best product managers I've worked with understand something crucial: they're not just managing a backlog, they're managing the long-term health of the systems their teams build.
Listening for the Signals
Good product managers develop an ear for developer hesitation. When an engineer says something like "well, there's a dirty way we could do this," that's a signal worth paying attention to. What they're really saying is: we can spend on the technical debt card now, but someone will have to pay that bill later.
When you hear that phrase, you have a decision to make. Either find more time for the developer to do things properly, or accept that you're taking on debt that will need to be addressed as a fast follow once the immediate business need is satisfied. Both are valid choices in the right context — but they need to be conscious choices, not accidental ones.
The Art, Not the Science
I don't think there's a perfect framework for these judgment calls. This is where software development is closer to art than science. A product manager needs to be able to make the call and be ready to provide cover for developers to get things done — whether that means protecting time to do it right, or shielding the team from criticism when a shortcut was the pragmatic choice.
What I can offer are some principles that have served me well:
The Strangler Fig Pattern has been the most effective framework I've found for addressing existing technical debt. Rather than attempting a risky big-bang replacement, you gradually replace components of a legacy system while keeping it running. It's patient, it's safe, and it works.
The Boy Scout Rule — leave the code better than you found it — is something I instill in my teams. It's not about heroic refactoring efforts; it's about continuous, incremental improvement as a habit.
Strategic Feature Bundling is an approach I've found particularly effective. Developers usually know exactly what the most broken part of their system is — they've likely been trying to avoid it. Product managers will pick up on this too if they're paying attention. When you identify several features that need to be implemented in that troubled area, bring them together. With business backing for a meaningful set of changes, developers can invest the time needed not just to solve the immediate business demands, but to gentrify a part of the codebase that everyone used to dread touching.
Where Debt Surfaces
Tooling like SonarQube can be valuable for keeping developers honest about code quality metrics. But the truth is, most developers already know where the problems are. The real question is whether the organization creates space to address them.
Unfortunately, technical debt most often becomes visible in two places: root cause analyses after something breaks, and retrospectives. We run retrospectives not at the end of every sprint, but quarterly — giving teams the perspective to identify patterns rather than just reacting to the latest incident.
A War Story
One of the worst cases of technical debt I've encountered was a deployment pipeline that seemed to have been built with used chewing gum and half a broken pencil by a developer who was long gone from the project. Literally no one knew how it worked, but everyone knew that it did work — most of the time.
I put up every red flag I could to signal that this was something that needed to get fixed. But it's hard to prioritize invisible risk over visible feature requests. Then one day, the pipeline finally stopped working. We couldn't deploy to production.
I took one of my strongest developers and put him full-time on rebuilding our infrastructure from scratch. For nearly two weeks, we held our breath and prayed we wouldn't have a critical defect in production that needed an emergency fix. Thankfully, we didn't — until the day we got the new pipeline working.
When the fix landed, it uncovered a cascade of knock-on improvements we hadn't anticipated. Build times dropped from 40 minutes to 8 minutes. The idea of quickly pushing a hotfix to staging before production became a much smaller burden. Everyone breathed a bit easier at night.
The Invisible Value
Here's the uncomfortable truth: the business never fully understood the value of that fix. They couldn't see the 32 minutes saved on every build, or the reduced stress during incident response, or the increased willingness to make small improvements because deployment was no longer painful. The fix had massive business value — value they're unlikely to ever fully appreciate.
I've tried using analogies to explain technical debt to non-technical stakeholders. Sometimes it works, but only with really good analogies and really receptive counterparts. Often, the message simply doesn't get across.
And sometimes that's okay. Part of the product manager's job is to make judgment calls that the business doesn't need to fully understand. When the pipeline broke, we had to fix it — that was non-negotiable. The business case wrote itself, even if the deeper lessons didn't land.
The PM as Shield and Strategist
The product manager's role in technical debt decisions isn't to be a gatekeeper or a pushover. It's to be a strategic partner who understands that sustainable velocity requires sustainable systems. Listen for the signals. Make conscious trade-offs. Bundle work strategically. And when something needs to be fixed, provide the cover your team needs to fix it properly.
Your developers are artists working in a medium that business stakeholders often can't see. Your job is to make sure they have the space to create something that will still be standing — and still be maintainable — long after the immediate deadline has passed.