When a product starts to grow, certain phrases begin to appear more frequently:

  • “Let’s live with this for now”
  • “We’ll clean it up later”
  • “Growth matters more at this stage”

Individually, these statements are not wrong. The real issue is when and how long these decisions remain unchallenged.

Technical debt is rarely the result of a single bad decision. More often, it is the outcome of decisions that once made sense but were never revisited.

Why technical debt becomes visible during growth

In early stages, technical debt is often tolerable because user volume is low, changes are limited, and system boundaries are not under pressure.

As the product grows, three things change: the frequency of change increases, the system carries more load, and side effects of past decisions surface.

Technical debt does not suddenly appear when a product grows. Its cost simply becomes impossible to ignore.

Is technical debt always a bad thing?

No. Every software system carries some level of technical debt, and that is natural.

The real distinction is between intentional technical debt and accidental technical debt.

Intentional debt is taken for a specific reason, has an implicit time horizon, and clear boundaries. Accidental debt accumulates silently, lacks ownership, and eventually creates areas no one wants to touch.

How product growth decisions amplify technical debt

During growth phases, teams often expand into new markets, support additional user segments, or increase the range of use cases.

These decisions may be sound from a product perspective. However, without asking the right technical questions, they significantly increase debt:

  • Can the current architecture support this expansion?
  • Is this pressure temporary or permanent?
  • Which assumptions does this decision invalidate?

When these questions are skipped, technical debt may remain invisible at first, but it starts accumulating interest with every new change.

Common mistakes teams make

Treating technical debt as a code-quality problem

Technical debt is often reduced to messy code. In reality, it is more frequently caused by poor abstractions, unclear boundaries, and ambiguous ownership.

Continuously postponing debt in the name of growth

“Growth first” can work in the short term. When it becomes permanent, every new feature costs more, bug resolution slows down, and teams hesitate to make changes.

At this stage, technical debt is no longer a technical issue. It becomes an organizational bottleneck.

Pretending technical debt does not exist

In many teams, technical debt is difficult to even discuss because it is not measured, does not fit cleanly into backlogs, and is perceived as not delivering business value.

The problem is that invisible debt grows unchecked. Debt that is not named is the most expensive kind.

When technical debt truly starts to hurt

Certain signals tend to appear together:

  • Simple changes take longer than expected
  • New team members struggle to understand the system
  • Every sprint includes unexpected technical work
  • Small bugs trigger cascading failures

These signs usually point to the same underlying issue:

The product has grown, but technical decisions have not evolved with it.

Common scenarios seen in growing products

After growth phases, similar patterns often emerge:

  • “We used to move faster”
  • Increased stress before every release
  • Areas of the codebase no one wants to touch
  • Phrases like “let’s not go there”

Rarely is this caused by a single bad choice. More often, it is the cumulative effect of many decisions that were never revisited.

Teams that regularly reassess technical debt alongside growth tend to preserve development speed, maintain decision quality, and avoid large disruptive rewrites.

Closing thoughts

Growing a product is not only about increasing usage or revenue. It also requires questioning whether past decisions are still valid.

Technical debt is a natural byproduct of growth. But if left unmanaged, it quietly becomes the strongest force slowing a product down.

The real question is not whether technical debt exists, but which debt we are aware of and which debt we are ignoring.