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!

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