After three technical-debt proposals were rejected, I changed the fourth: instead of leading with code quality, I explained which business process the debt affected, what it was costing, and what decision I needed. Management approved that proposal. It is one experience, not a formula for guaranteed approval—but it shows how to make the trade-off legible to people who do not work in the code.
Why the first three proposals did not get through
A request to “clean up the code” can sound optional to a leader deciding among product work, operational needs, and limited engineering capacity. The technical problem may be real, but terms like maintainability or refactoring do not, by themselves, show what business outcome is at stake.
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The useful shift was to stop asking management to infer that connection. I named the process or product outcome the system supported, described the observable friction caused by the debt, and made a bounded request with a clear trade-off. That made the fourth proposal easier to evaluate alongside other work.
Translate the debt into an affected business process
Start with what the system enables: a customer completing a transaction, an employee processing an order, or a team releasing a product change. Then connect the debt to that activity. For example, explain that a fragile integration slows changes to checkout, or that a recurring manual workaround adds steps to a support process. Use an example that is true for your system; do not imply a customer impact you have not observed.
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This is more than a communications trick. A 2018 multiple-case study examined 188 technical-debt items across two large software-development companies and identified 14 business processes. Its authors found that business-process management helped relate debt to criticality and urgency, and that considering business priorities could change prioritization decisions. The study covers two cases, so it does not establish that the same method will generalize to every organization. Read the study.
The Software Engineering Institute’s podcast transcript also makes the connection between maintainability and user-observable or performance effects explicit. A speaker identified as Ipek says, “Helping them make that connection actually also helps make the conversation a lot easier.” The transcript excerpt identifies the speaker only by first name. Read the SEI transcript.
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Show the cost of carrying the debt
Replace “this code is hard to work with” with evidence a decision-maker can assess. Depending on what you can measure, that might include repeated incidents, extra engineering effort, a delayed delivery, or a manual workaround. State the timeframe and where the observation comes from. If you have no reliable measure, say so and use a specific example rather than inventing a number.
Separate what has already happened from what you expect could happen. “The team spent 12 hours on workarounds last month” is an observation if it is recorded. “This may delay the planned integration” is a forecast; identify the dependency and why you expect delay. A risk forecast is not a certainty, and an estimate should be labeled as an estimate.
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Then explain the cost of waiting in the same terms: more effort, delivery friction, business risk, or lost opportunity. Avoid claiming a universal financial return for debt remediation. The sources cited here do not establish one.
Make a bounded proposal with a decision attached
Present a piece of work that can be evaluated, not an open-ended request to “fix the architecture.” A useful proposal states the affected process, the evidence, the scope, the estimated effort and resources, the expected consequence, and when the team will review the result. Make clear whether you are asking for approval to do the work, to reserve capacity, or to accept a risk.
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- Business process or outcome: Name who depends on the affected system and what they need it to do.
- Current evidence: Give observed effort, incidents, delays, customer effects, or a specific upcoming dependency, with its timeframe and source.
- Cost of delay: Distinguish a measured ongoing cost from a forecast of future impact.
- Options: Compare a defined remediation, a smaller mitigation, delaying with the risk accepted, and taking no action when that is a viable choice.
- Recommendation and ask: State the scope, estimated resources, decision owner, and point at which you will review whether the work achieved its intended result.
This is a practical synthesis of the cited guidance and case study, not a prescribed template. Keep the ask small enough to assess and specific enough to approve or decline.
Compare debt work with other priorities
Technical debt competes with feature work and other operational needs for people, time, and money. Put the options on shared axes rather than presenting engineering effort as the only measure. Gartner’s infrastructure guidance recommends consistent assessment using business value, financial resources, direct risk, and indirect risk. It also emphasizes aligning resources with business outcomes. That guidance is specifically about infrastructure and portfolio management; use the factors as a lens for an application-code proposal, not as a claim that Gartner prescribes a universal scoring method. Read Gartner’s infrastructure technical-debt guidance.
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| Comparison axis | Question to answer |
|---|---|
| Business value or criticality | Which process, customer outcome, or delivery goal does the work support? |
| Urgency | Is there a deadline, dependency, incident pattern, or other reason the decision cannot wait? |
| Resources | What time, people, and money would each option require? |
| Direct risk | What could fail or be delayed in the system or process itself? |
| Indirect risk | What downstream work, teams, or outcomes could be affected? |
| Cost or opportunity cost of delay | What additional effort, friction, exposure, or displaced opportunity is expected if the work waits? |
Do not assign precise scores unless your organization has a reason to do so and can explain the basis. Gartner’s PAID model—Plan, Address, Ignore, Delay—offers another way to organize debt decisions into a prioritized matrix that considers risk probability and business impact. The public abstract describes the model at a high level; it does not provide detailed implementation instructions. See Gartner’s PAID model overview.
What to do when the answer is still no
Business framing improves the quality of the decision; it cannot guarantee approval. If a proposal is declined, ask what is driving the choice: limited capacity, low urgency, unclear evidence, or a different business priority. Then record the accepted risk and revisit the decision when a trigger changes—for example, a dependency becomes immediate or the cost of workarounds grows. If a smaller mitigation is feasible, put its effort and residual risk beside the full remediation option.
The point is not to disguise engineering work as something else. It is to give leaders enough context to weigh its consequences against the work already competing for the same resources.
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