You can refactor code. Try refactoring a six-person approval chain.
Technical debt has a constituency. Engineers complain about it. Leaders budget for it. Tools measure it.
Process debt is invisible. It hides in calendar invites and approval chains. Nobody owns it. Everyone suffers from it.
The symptoms: a deploy that needs sign-off from legal, security, two product owners, architecture board, and finance. A data request that routes through four teams. A schema change that requires a steering committee. Each step made sense when it was added. Together, they’re organizational arthritis.
The math is brutal. A one-hour delay, repeated daily, across five teams, costs 25 hours per week. That’s a full-time employee doing nothing but waiting.
Technical debt slows your code. Process debt slows your people. And people are more expensive than code.
The fix isn’t removing all process. It’s treating process like code: review it, refactor it, delete what no longer serves a purpose. Run an experiment-try two weeks with one fewer approval and measure risk vs speed. If you designed the approval chain, you own the delay.
Process deserves the same engineering discipline you apply to systems.
Which approval in your workflow no longer matches the risk it was designed to prevent?