Shifting from Tech Debt to Tech Capital 🏦
How to move engineering teams from a mindset of scarcity to one of abundance
A few months ago I sat down for a coffee in Rome with my friend Aviv, who is an executive coach and consultant, and was in town for a couple of days.
Since we are both nerds serious engineering professionals, we ended up talking about technical debt. And it’s not just us: as we both agreed, engineering teams just love discussing tech debt.
There’s always some legacy code that needs refactoring, a messy architecture that slows things down, or a new way of doing things beckoning us. It’s an easy problem to rally people around—who doesn’t want to clean up the mess?
But, as Aviv noted, here’s the catch: tech debt is a capped problem.
Fixing it might make you feel better, but it won’t make your company win. Because you can only improve so much by reducing friction.
What actually moves the needle isn’t removing liabilities—it’s building assets.
Enter tech capital: the engineering investments that compound over time and make a company stronger, faster, and more valuable. Unlike tech debt, tech capital isn’t just about fixing the past—it’s about creating leverage for the future.
I love this concept and today I brought in Aviv to discuss it more, and explore how to make teams shift from a mindset of scarcity (debt) to one of abundance (capital).
So here is the agenda:
💸 Tech debt is capped — why focusing only on cleanup keeps teams stuck.
🏦 What is tech capital? — and how it differs from just shipping more features.
🔬 Real-world examples — of companies using engineering investments to accelerate growth.
🏃♂️ How to start building tech capital — without waiting for permission.
🔨 Using modern tools — a roundup of our favorite tools to create leverage.
Let’s dive in!
p.s. Aviv works with a lot of tech leaders and recently wrote a great book on creating successful R&D organizations. You may want to check it out! (no affiliation)
💸 Tech debt is capped
Before going any deeper, let’s start with a disclaimer.
The quality of your code base matters — without a doubt. Don’t allow your CEO to send this article over Slack and say, “See?? Aviv said we don’t need to fix our debt.”
Our focus here is on maximizing return-on-investment.
Tech debt discussions often focus on reducing pain, but there’s only so much upside to fixing old problems. Let’s break down why:
✂️ You can’t eliminate all debt — some trade-offs are inevitable and even necessary for speed.
📏 ROI is limited — reducing tech debt improves stability and reduces friction, but it doesn’t compound in value. Once it’s paid off, the gains stop.
🪤 The Productivity Trap — many teams focus on refactoring to feel productive, but it doesn’t necessarily drive business results.
✅ The Illusion of Being “Done” — there’s no final state where tech debt is completely gone. There’s always something new to clean up. Especially with hard-set “engineering time” budgets.
So, instead of obsessing over what holds us back, let’s focus on what can propel us forward 👇
🏦 What is Tech Capital?
If tech debt is a liability, then tech capital is an asset—it’s what makes an engineering org more valuable over time.
It’s not about features — adding another button won’t build long-term leverage.
It’s about compounding value — the kind of improvements that create an exponential impact.
It enhances the business over time — unlike one-time fixes, tech capital increases in value as the company grows.
In my experience, the three most common ways companies create tech capital are:
⚡ Engineering Velocity – investing in developer experience (DX) to make shipping faster and more reliable.
🦸 Internal Superpowers – giving marketing, sales, or customer support better tools that remove bottlenecks.
🗃️ Data Leverage – systems that generate better insights, rather than just storing data, and using unique datasets to increase the value the company has to offer.
The key question is: “Will this investment make us faster, more powerful, or smarter six months from now?”
🔬 Real-World Examples
So here are some real examples of the above:
 | A guest post by
|