Shipping features or product updates fast is exciting, but it hinges on how maintainable your codebase is. Velocity and maintainability aren’t separate goals—they’re intertwined. But for many engineering teams today, the balance between technical debt and feature development feels like an endless battle.
Feature development often takes priority because it delivers visible, immediate results—new features that delight customers and drive business.
But what about technical debt?
It's the quiet problem that builds up, offering few quick wins and easy to sweep under the rug.
Here’s the real issue: ignoring technical debt for too long will eventually slow down your ability to deliver features. Over time, it creates a drag on your engineering team’s productivity and the real challenge becomes figuring out how to keep delivering features while maintaining a healthy technical foundation.
In this blog, we’ll get into the common struggles engineering teams face in this balancing act and share strategies to manage technical debt without slowing down product development.
Why Does Technical Debt Keep Growing?
Many engineering teams focus on feature development because it’s exciting, brings visible results, and offers immediate business impact. However, technical debt gets deferred and slowly accumulates, leading to a situation where each new feature becomes harder to ship due to underlying complexities.
But here’s the catch: technical debt directly affects your shipping velocity.
If your code is hard to maintain, it slows down development efforts. As a result, feature development takes longer, and engineering teams lose momentum to deliver faster.
The truth is, a messy, cluttered codebase will always slow down your engineering team, just like a pothole-ridden road would slow down traffic. Even the most talented engineers can't move fast if they’re navigating through a web of technical debt.
The cleaner your code, the faster your team can ship new features. It’s as simple as that.
The Allure of Developing New Things
It's easy to understand why feature development often gets more attention than technical debt. Whether you're a new developer or a seasoned pro, working on something fresh and exciting always feels more rewarding.
New features are fun—they're built from the ground up, they’re highly visible, and they deliver instant results. They're also easy to show off to customers and stakeholders. You can immediately see the impact, and it gives developers a sense of accomplishment like they’re truly making a difference.
On the other hand, technical debt can feel like dull maintenance work. It's invisible, unglamorous, and often handed to new developers as a way to help them learn the codebase. But let’s be honest—working through old, messy code can feel draining.
So, why does feature development win out so often? Here are a few reasons:
- Immediate Business Impact: New features can directly influence customer satisfaction, sales, and business growth.
- Stakeholder Pressure: Leadership and product teams often push for quick wins, which tends to prioritize new development over internal clean-up.
- Tangible Results: Features are easy to measure, whether it’s in the form of customer adoption, feedback, or revenue. Technical debt, on the other hand, is harder to quantify and less exciting to discuss.
It’s easy to see why maintainability is often considered secondary. But that’s a mistake. When code is easy to maintain, your team moves faster. Treating maintainability as a separate task creates a “deal with it later” mentality that never comes to fruition. Before you know it, you’re dealing with a codebase that’s bogged down with issues and holding your team back.
Here’s an example: imagine your team has an API built in Node.js, but over time, you face performance bottlenecks and decide to rebuild it in Go or Rust. If the API contracts are clear and well-defined, you can swap out the underlying implementation without disrupting the rest of the system. Optimizing for maintainability makes these kinds of transitions easier, allowing for faster feature delivery in the long run.
This approach highlights a critical point: maintainable code should be easy to refactor or delete without affecting other parts of the system. Reducing the external surface area of your codebase increases velocity because your team doesn’t have to wade through complex dependencies to make changes.
💡 Suggested Reading: Is Code Complexity Dragging Down Your Engineering Team's Productivity?
Why Treating Velocity and Maintainability Separately Is a Mistake?
A major insight here is that treating maintainability as a separate concern from velocity is a mistake. It’s tempting to focus on shipping features quickly, promising to clean up the code later. But that cleanup rarely happens because the team never gets the breathing room to stop feature development entirely for debt reduction.
The longer this goes on, the more technical debt piles up, leading to what feels like a sudden slowdown in velocity. But that slowdown isn’t sudden—it’s the result of accumulated debt. Teams lose momentum, which is critical for productivity. And once momentum is lost, it can be tough to regain, leading to even more frustration and missed deadlines.
💡Additional Read: What is Software Development Velocity and How to Improve it?
How Can You Balance Technical Debt and Feature Development?
1. Make Technical Debt Part of Your Development Process
Think of technical debt like tidying up while you work. If you’re building a large-scale SaaS platform, for example, every time you add a new feature, take a few moments to clean up unused endpoints or refactor a service for better performance. This way, you’re not letting old code pile up and cause headaches down the road.
Take a payment gateway integration—while adding the new feature, your team also improves the existing billing system by removing outdated code. Addressing these small issues during development avoids the need for major rewrites later.
2. Treat Maintainability as a Facet of Velocity
When your code is easy to maintain, your engineering team can move faster. Think of an e-commerce platform with constant changes in inventory management. By sticking to clear coding standards, writing modular code, and including unit tests, your engineering team sets up a system where updates can be made without fear of breaking anything.
It’s like documenting APIs with versioning in mind—when updates are needed, they can be rolled out smoothly and quickly, keeping your development speed high while minimizing bugs.
3. Prioritize High-Impact Debt
In a codebase that’s been around for several years, some parts are more critical than others. For example, you may have a legacy authentication service that isn’t scalable or secure enough to handle growing user traffic. This poses a risk to the entire platform, so it becomes a priority over smaller technical debt like outdated logging practices in less frequently used services. By fixing high-impact issues like authentication bottlenecks first, you ensure that core functionality remains stable and scalable.
This way, your team can continue developing new features without being slowed down by major systemic flaws.
4. Track and Measure Technical Debt
Technical debt is like clutter in a workspace. If you don’t track it, it builds up and slows everyone down. By measuring things like code complexity and time spent resolving issues, you can see where the clutter is piling up.
This is where a data-driven approach can guide you forward, because this approach helps your engineering team decide when it’s time to clear things out and prevent disruptions.
Regularly tracking these metrics gives you a clearer picture of which areas need attention before they become a bigger problem.
💡 Also Read: How to Effectively Calculate Cyclomatic Complexity in Software Projects?
5. Communicate the Impact of Technical Debt
A common reason why technical debt gets deprioritized is that it’s hard to explain its impact to non-technical stakeholders. However, by communicating how maintainability improves velocity—showing how well-architected systems allow for faster, more efficient feature development—engineering teams can build the case for investing time in technical debt reduction.
This approach also helps avoid the "false assumption" that ignoring maintainability will allow teams to move faster. In reality, companies that ignore technical debt end up with compounding slowdowns. At first, everything seems fine, but over time, as the codebase grows and the original team members leave, the technical debt starts creating bottlenecks, slowing development down to a crawl.
Final Thoughts: Maintainability and Velocity Go Hand-in-Hand
Maintainability and velocity are two sides of the same coin. Clean, easy-to-work-with code allows you to move faster and with more confidence. Without it, velocity becomes a short-lived burst of speed that eventually fizzles out.
Think about it: when your codebase is well-organized, your engineers aren’t wasting time untangling messy code, hunting down bugs, or fixing performance issues. Instead, they’re focused on what really matters—building new features, improving the product, and pushing the business forward. On the other hand, a disorganized codebase turns even simple tasks into long, frustrating efforts.
Moving fast doesn’t mean rushing. It’s about building a strong foundation that keeps your engineering team agile in the long run. When you prioritize maintainability from the start, your team can keep delivering features quickly and reliably, without being dragged down by technical debt. Otherwise, it’s like building a house of cards—fast at first, but fragile and unsustainable.
💡 Suggested Read: Building a Code Quality Culture: A Path to Reducing Technical Debt
