Think of technical debt like a credit card. Your data platform maxed it out years ago. Your engineers? They’re stuck paying the minimum every sprint.
Credit card interest stacks. So does technical debt. Your CFO can read a credit card statement. Technical debt? That needs to be translated into the same language: hours lost, dollars burned, features delayed.
Research from SonarSource shows technical debt costs $306,000 per year for every million lines of code. That’s 5,500 developer hours - gone. Not building features. Not improving reliability. Just paying interest on past shortcuts.
But here’s where the analogy breaks down.
Credit card interest is predictable. You know the rate. You can plan for it.
Technical debt hides. It shows up as slower deployments. Longer onboarding. More incidents. Higher turnover. You’re paying interest in a dozen currencies, none of them on your balance sheet.
The formula is simple: If maintenance consumes 40% of team time, and half of that is debt-related, you’re losing 20% of engineering capacity to interest payments alone.
For a 10-person team at $150K loaded cost each: $300K per year - and rising.
Paying down debt isn’t optional. It’s the only way to stop the interest from eating your roadmap.
How are you helping your CFO read your technical debt statement?