Technical debt sits awkwardly between engineering and the business: visible to developers, invisible to many stakeholders, and easy to punt. This case study walks through a pragmatic, repeatable approach a leadership group used to make debt decisions collaborative, transparent, and outcome-driven. The example below is an anonymized composite built from common practices observed in product engineering teams.

Context: the problem nobody wanted to own

The engineering group had a growing backlog of refactors, flaky tests, and architectural smells. Feature delivery remained the priority, so debt items accumulated in a backlog out of sight. When incidents occurred, leadership blamed engineering for being reactive. Engineers felt blocked and defensively promised short-term fixes. Product and execs saw the cost only when it affected SLAs or release dates.

The trigger for change was less about a single incident and more a persistent tension: too many hidden trade-offs, repeated emergency fixes, and a feeling that debt discussions always ended with the manager saying “not now.” The team needed a way to make technical debt a first-class, business-understandable conversation.

The idea: a tech debt marketplace

Rather than treating debt as a vague backlog category, the team introduced a marketplace model. The objective was simple: create a shared forum where engineers could propose debt investments, explain the business impact, and let stakeholders allocate a finite budget of attention and time.

Key principles:

• Visible proposals: Every debt item is described like a mini-feature requestproblem, proposed fix, expected outcome.
• Priority currency: Proposals compete for a limited set of squad sprint slots or dedicated debt sprint capacity.
• Business framing: Engineers must tie debt work to observable outcomes that product and leadership care about.
• Time-boxed experiments: Debt work is scoped so it can be evaluated quickly and reversed if it underdelivers.

How they built it: a step-by-step approach

Below are the concrete steps used to set up the marketplace. Each step focuses on clarity and low frictionno heavy process, just better conversations.

1. Create a simple proposal template

The team adopted a one-page format stored in the project wiki. Each proposal included:

• Title and short summary
• Symptoms and observations (who sees this and how often)
• Business impact (user experience, time lost, incident risk)
• Proposed approach and estimated effort (small, medium, large)
• Success criteria and how to measure them

2. Open the marketplace weekly

Instead of ad-hoc conversations, the team set a recurring 30-minute slot. Engineers presented proposals briefly and answered questions. Product and other stakeholders attended as consumers of valuenot to veto but to weigh trade-offs against other priorities.

3. Introduce a visible allocation mechanism

The group maintained a simple board showing available capacity for debt work each sprint or quarter. Stakeholders could allocate capacity by voting or by directly assigning a budget (for example, two sprint-days for small proposals, a half-sprint for medium ones). The visual scarcity forced clearer prioritization.

4. Require outcome-oriented success criteria

Every accepted proposal included measurable acceptance criteria: faster deploy times, fewer flaky tests, improved error rates, or lower mean time to recovery. The focus on results reduced vague, open-ended refactor requests.

5. Time-box and review

Debt work was implemented in short, observable increments. At the next marketplace session, the team reviewed outcomes against the success criteria and decided whether to continue, iterate, or stop.

How they made the business case

One of the biggest barriers was translating engineering language into outcomes that product managers and execs care about. The team leaned on three tactics:

• Translate symptoms to user impact: Instead of saying “replace legacy queue,” they framed it as “reduce page load errors that affect checkout flow during peak traffic.”
• Show per-event cost: When possible, describe how many support hours or customer complaints a bug or flake generates. Framing technical problems as operational cost helps non-technical stakeholders compare options.
• Offer experiments, not indefinite promises: Propose a small, measurable pilot that proves the value before committing larger resources.

Roles and behaviors that made it work

The marketplace succeeded because people adopted new behaviors more than because of a new tool. The team encouraged:

• Engineers as advocates: Presentations focused on business impact, not technical elegance.
• Product as allocators: Product managers were empowered to steward capacity across features and debt, and to explain trade-offs to stakeholders.
• Managers as facilitators: Engineering managers coached proposal framing, curated the board for noise, and prevented the marketplace from becoming a backlog dumping ground.

Common pitfalls and how they avoided them

• Overloading the board: At first, many low-value proposals surfaced. The fix: add a quick triage so only proposals with clear outcomes reach the marketplace.
• Vague success criteria: Some proposals used vague promises. The team refused items without measurable acceptance checks.
• Political gaming: When teams tried to capture capacity by inflating business language, product pushed back and asked for concrete evidence or a pilot.

What changed in everyday practice

The marketplace shifted conversations from abstract urgency to comparative value. Engineers learned to define the return on investment for cleaner code. Product managers gained a predictable, lightweight process to balance technical and product priorities. Decisions that previously defaulted to “debt later” were now explicit trade-offs with visible accounting.

How to try a minimal version in your org

If you want to experiment, start small:

• Create a one-page proposal template and store it where your team already looks for work.
• Reserve a 2030 minute slot each sprint for marketplace pitches.
• Limit capacity up front (for example, one or two days per sprint) so choices are meaningful.
• Insist on measurable success criteria before approving work.
• Review results in the next session and treat the marketplace like a learning loop.

Over time you can evolve the mechanics: add lightweight scoring, invite more cross-functional representation, or allocate a portion of quarterly planning specifically for debt initiatives. The important part is committing to transparency and forcing trade-offs that reflect business priorities.

When technical debt stops being an engineering-only problem and becomes a jointly owned set of investment choices, teams make clearer decisions and avoid the slow erosion of quality that undermines velocity. The marketplace approach transforms debt from a source of blame into a series of accountable betseach with a hypothesis, a scope, and a way to measure whether it paid off.