Managing debt: Organisational debt

We are all familiar with the term Technical Debt, although it is violated and / or confused several times.

Oversimplifying, the Technical Debt is the conscious decision to trade dates for technical excellence.

And, as any money decision, it should be made by the money owners: Product Management.

So, if you find yourself / your teams taking tech shortcuts for the sake of “delivering”, without that explicit Product Ownership recognisition… it’s a clear bad smell.
Following the same pattern, it is not the only debt a Product Manager may assume.

Having debts is not good or bad

Except some lucky ones, we all have mortgages, right?
We trade off having a debt, in favour of a value in return: A house.

Some of us run a business (either for ourselves, or for a company’s benefit).
And we know how lucrative getting credits may be …as long as we manage to get more value out of it!
So, a “debt” may be good or bad depending on what we do with it.

• Do we get enough revenue from that debt? If we don’t … we will just be poorer
• Do we pay it back? If we don’t, we will lose the house, and/or interests… and we may be chased by the people we owe money to…
• Are we assuming too much? If we do, our credit rating will go down, and no one will trust us anymore…

Organisational Debt

Although it is abused and confused, the shapes of technical debt are relatively known, and several ways to measure them are out there for us to use.

However, the Organisation debt is not that frequently measured, nor valued.

And it’s extremely expensive.

We all developers — (Note: I’m proud of that title, and I’m still reluctant to change that to “engineer”. Being a developer, be it for software, for people, for process is a great title )— scream and shout loud whenever we smell a suboptimal technical solution.

However, we seem to be blind to all that waste surrounding us due to a poorly managed Org Debt.

So, watch out for its symptoms, let me name a few:

• Attrition, burn out people staying, difficult to find candidates
• Extra hours becoming normal
• Bussy work. Unclear why… but let’s do … stuff
• No decission… wait and see (and usually it is you the one waiting while other implicit decisions are being made)
• One-2-one meetings (or crowded, but single direction) becoming paramount… no team goals / behaviours. Hence knowledge is reduced, and cascades with multiple visions
• You are not challenged. You shape your team to your convenience, and of course you are always right and good…
• Things are so complex here, can’t be changed
• No (real) progress to people’s appetittes
• Changing things are so slow and expensive because things are so complex here

As in any market, if your credit risk is high you lose trust.

And recovering trust is extremely difficult (if possible at all).

So, let’s manage the organisational debt following the same principles we want to follow with any debt:

1. Let’s ensure it is visible and recognised. Easier said than done, but let’s start verbalising and recognising we are assuming that debt consciously)
2. Let’s ensure we manage it (i.e. we are clear what is it we are trading, we pay it back). The interests on this type of debt are extremely high.