Filter By:
Tech Debt Burndown Podcast S3E4: Sarah Wells
In the fourth episode of season three of the Tech Debt Burndown podcast, Sarah Wells joins Chris Swan and Nick Selby to talk about the lessons learned from her decade at the Financial Times, and their journey to implementing microservices (the same lessons that informed her book, “Enabling Microservices Success).” We touch on whether the purpose of microservices is to scale a system, or to scale an engineering organisation. By breaking down monoliths into independent domains, teams can reduce cognitive complexity and release software hundreds of times a day. Sarah warns, however, that this shift introduces a “maintenance treadmill,” requiring robust automation for library upgrades, security patching, and cross-service governance to prevent a sprawl of unmanageable tech debt.
Read more
Tech Debt Burndown Podcast S3E3: Matthew Skelton
In episode three of season three of the Tech Debt Burndown podcastTeam Topologies co-author Matthew Skelton joins Chris Swan and Nick Selby to discuss the relationship between tech debt and cognitive load. Matthew explains that every organization has a finite “cognitive load budget,” and technical debt acts as a constant drain on this capacity, creating friction that slows down development and increases operational risk. By framing tech debt in terms of human cognition and team boundaries, the discussion highlights how healthy software evolution depends on keeping systems understandable and manageable for the people who build and run them.
Read more
Tech Debt Burndown Podcast S3E2: AI Coding Assistants
In episode two of this season of the Tech Debt Burndown podcast, Chris Swan and Nick Selby chat about how AI Coding Assistants have suddenly become very good, maybe even good enough to write “load bearing” code. The constraints that existed around producing code have potentially disappeared, but other constraints live on, and we’re still finding out what this means for product management.
Read moreTech Debt Burndown Podcast Series 3 E1: Tech Debt as a Service
Tech Debt as a Service (Welcome to the Slopocene) After a long hiatus, the Tech Debt Burndown podcast has returned for its third season. We’ve got a bunch of episodes (some recorded quite a while ago) in the can, so more to come; along with some fresh stuff, as 2026 has been a wild ride already.
Read more
Why Tech Debt Matters – And How to Pay It Off
When developers cut corners to ship products faster, they take on technical debt—a trade-off that can accelerate early growth but create long-term instability. Unlike financial debt, which can be strategic, tech debt compounds over time, leading to fragile systems, costly failures, and expensive remediation efforts.
Read more
How Much Tech Debt is Too Much?
Tech debt is inevitable in innovation. The question isn’t whether your organization has it—but rather how well it’s managed. Proactive leaders strategically take on tech debt when necessary and implement processes to track, assess, and address it before it becomes a bottleneck.
Read more