Every Agile team faces that moment—the pressure to deliver faster, to push something out the door before it’s truly ready. Maybe a deadline sneaks up, or maybe stakeholders are pushing hard, needing to show progress or meet a market opportunity. In the moment, it can feel easier to cut a corner or two, hoping you can clean up the mess later. But what happens when “later” never comes, and those little shortcuts accumulate? This is how technical debt sneaks in, and though it might not seem obvious at first, it can quietly snowball, creating massive hurdles for your team down the line.
Here’s the thing: technical debt isn’t exactly about bugs or unfinished tasks. It’s subtler than that. Think of it like borrowing time from your future self. You push something out now, but you know you’ll have to spend time fixing, refactoring, or optimizing it down the road. The longer you leave that debt unpaid, the more interest it accrues, slowing your team down when you least expect it. The problem is, teams rarely have the luxury to “pay it back” right away. There’s always another feature to build or another fire to put out. Before long, the team is dragging a weight that prevents them from hitting their true stride.
I once saw this happen to a team who gave in to some well-intentioned stakeholder pressure. They had cut corners on automation tests and skipped refactoring a particularly messy part of the codebase, with the promise to clean it up in the next sprint. Fast forward three sprints, and the technical debt started barking back. Errors popped up in seemingly random places, build times increased dramatically, and small changes broke parts of the app that no one expected. Team morale tanked because they felt they were working harder but getting less done. What’s worse, the velocity dropped, and it took longer to fix things than it would have if they’d just done the right thing from the start.
The tricky part with technical debt is that you can’t always see the effects immediately. It feels abstract—like a problem for future ‘you’ to handle. But ‘future you’ often gets hit harder than expected. That snowball effect of small technical sacrifices can morph into systemic problems faster than anyone realizes. If you leave too much undone work in your codebase, it becomes a productivity sink. Suddenly, what used to take a day or two now takes a week because the architecture is riddled with brittle, fragile structures that can’t support new functionality easily. This is how technical debt crowds out innovation.
Now, does this mean you should never ship unfinished work or take a calculated risk with a shortcut? Not exactly. There’s a balance to find. Sometimes you have to make trade-offs to hit business goals, but those decisions should be made thoughtfully—and with full transparency. That’s where good Agile practices really come into play. One of the most important tools you’ve got is openness. If you decide to release something imperfect, you need to communicate the trade-offs. Everyone on the team should be aware of what’s being borrowed and how it will be “paid back” later.
Managing stakeholder expectations is an art form, really. They’re often not in the weeds with you, so they may not fully understand the impact of technical debt. As a Scrum Master or Product Owner, part of your role is to act as a translator between the team and the business. You need to be upfront about what happens when you compromise quality. Let’s say you release a feature early, knowing there will be a cost to clean up later. Stakeholders should understand not just that short-term win but also the future implications for speed, cost, and customer satisfaction.
A helpful strategy is to create clear, visual backlogs where unfinished work and tech debt are just as visible as new features. This keeps everyone, from developers to execs, on the same page. If you accumulate too much debt, it should start to hurt more obviously from a planning perspective, making it impossible to keep overloading the team—without something else giving way.
It’s easy to let technical debt slip under the radar, especially in a fast-paced environment where the immediate focus is always on delivering value early and often. But if it’s allowed to accumulate, it can erode the very foundation your future work relies on. The lines between adding value to a product and introducing risk become blurred, especially when you’re chasing deadlines or trying to appease anxious stakeholders. And while undone work might feel like a short-term nuisance, technical debt lingers longer and digs deeper.
Undone work—the bits that don’t meet your Definition of Done—might look innocent at first glance. Maybe you skip writing tests for a feature or refresh only part of the documentation, promising to get back to it later. The danger is that this “later” often never arrives. What starts as undone work becomes technical debt. It festers and takes on a life of its own, slowing down future sprints and making your codebase more difficult, even risky, to interact with. Features that were once a joy to demo become sensitive landmines. A simple change request could pull you into rabbit holes of unexpected breakages because the shortcuts you once took compound over time.
What’s even trickier is how this impacts team morale. Teams love shipping; they thrive on adding value and seeing people use their work. But when unfinished work keeps coming back around, popping up in future sprints as bugs or UE tickets, the dopamine rush fades. Developers can start to feel like they’re stuck in a cycle of rework instead of moving forward, building exciting new features. That sense of progression is critical to maintaining morale. When technical debt gets out of hand, everything feels slower than it should be, and as a result, frustration settles in. I’ve seen great teams become disillusioned because, rather than innovating, they felt like they spent sprint after sprint cleaning up old messes.
So, how do you manage this without alienating stakeholders who are, understandably, eager to see value sooner rather than later? The first step is being transparent about the cost of cutting corners. Many business leaders know the term “technical debt” but may not grasp its eventual toll—the drop in velocity, the dip in quality, the increased risk of future failure. Engage stakeholders by talking about the long-term impact, not just in technical terms but in ways that connect directly to their priorities. Slowing releases may be painful now but avoiding the trap of debt allows the team to move faster in future sprints and deliver actual, lasting value. When businesses understand this trade-off in terms of future capacity and risk, the conversation looks different.
One technique I’ve found particularly helpful is making technical debt visible to everyone—whether it’s through tracking debt in the backlog, as its own “story” in planning, or just keeping a separate Kanban board for it. That way, the whole team, including non-technical folks, can see when the debt is growing and decide when to deal with it. It’s essential to treat it as part of your continuous improvement process, much like how you tackle product bugs. If left invisible, it accumulates in silence. But if you put a spotlight on it, there’s room to discuss its trade-offs openly.
You can also consider dedicating a percentage of each sprint to paying down this debt. It’s less glamorous than launching a new feature, but it helps the team stay nimble. Plus, it sends the signal that quality is something your team actively cares about—both to themselves and to the business. Something as simple as reserving time for “technical debt sprints” or allocating dedicated capacity within regular sprints can go a long way toward keeping a healthy balance between delivering new features and maintaining existing ones.
At the end of the day, maintaining transparency and leverage with your stakeholders is key. You don’t want the team to get stuck in a pattern of never-ending catch-up, but you also can’t always say no to the business. By balancing short-term wins with long-term sustainability, you build better products and healthier teams. Make sure your stakeholders understand that good craftsmanship today saves everyone time, money, and frustration later on. It’s about building trust—not just within your team, but also with those you deliver to.
You’ve got to keep an eye on technical debt. It’s like a slow leak—it may not flood the ship right away, but over time, it’ll cause failure. Good Agile teams know the importance of delivering value incrementally, but they also understand that sustainable delivery relies on well-crafted, maintainable code. Sure, the business might push for speed, but if you build on shaky ground, what you deliver quickly today may hold you back from delivering anything at all tomorrow.
Continuing to find that balance between business demands and technical sustainability is what separates teams that struggle to thrive from those that excel. If you can keep technical debt on your radar, communicate its repercussions clearly, and treat it like any other backlog item, then you’re already ahead of the game.