The first rush of business growth feels exhilarating – new customers, new features, faster markets – but every technical shortcut taken to hit your goals joins the invisible ledger. Left unchecked, that ledger swells – the changes you made to move you forward start dragging performance, IT budgets and tech talent morale in the opposite direction.

When the UK’s scaleups are outpacing expectations, demonstrating resilience and achieving an average annual revenue increase of 43% – more than twice the OECD benchmark – the startups community needs to get a handle on technical debt, fast. 

Where technical debt starts

It’s easy to understand: as organisations scale, their technology ecosystems tend to grow in parallel. Fragmentation is the red alert, but first, companies need to understand the most common (and avoidable) causes of technical debt.

Over-integration tops the list when it comes to the root causes of technical debt. Each time a business plugs in a ‘best-of-breed’ tool for a single use case – payments here, analytics there – it adds another API, another contract, another workflow to maintain. Individually, these decisions feel rational; collectively, they create a patchwork that engineers have to monitor, upgrade and secure. And each of these small patchworked solutions has the potential to become a future bottleneck when versions change or worse – when providers sunset their services.

Technical shortcuts rarely appear in capital expenditure tables, yet they erode margins in subtle ways. Paying for unused software features, using extra tools to make systems work together, and passing tasks between teams all create inefficiencies that finance leaders eventually see in rising unit costs.

Legacy systems amplify the problem. Once a vendor stops updating its platform, internal teams step in with stop-gap fixes to keep the lights on. Those patches seldom scale and rarely align with modern architectures. When your business strategy pivots but your underlying tech stack does not, the mismatched functions accumulate – adding to technical debt.

How to spot debt dragging performance

Time to market sends the first warning. When sprints stretch and launches slip because engineers untangle links instead of writing fresh code, debt has turned toxic. Manual workarounds – exporting spreadsheets, re-entering data – also show trouble. Customers never see the code, yet they feel the delay through slow updates and uneven service.

One of the clearest signs of technical debt hides in payments. As companies grow into new regions, they bolt on local payment vendors to support new currencies and methods. Over time, these add up to a tangle of providers, each with their own integration and maintenance requirements, which contribute to high technical debt.

The strain grows when vendors chase short-term wins over long-term stability. Without built-in redundancy or failover, that burden shifts to internal teams. Engineers end up managing risk instead of driving progress – adding yet another layer to the debt.

Building for scale and simplicity

A proactive approach keeps the stack lean. Start by reducing custom connectors and integrations, and instead look for platforms that cover multiple needs through a single, well-documented API. Regularly audit your integrations, retiring what no longer adds value before it turns into technical debt.

Leaders should plot debt reduction in milestones: remove one legacy gateway per quarter, consolidate reporting databases, replace brittle scripts with shared services.

Of course, not all technical debt can be avoided, but it can be contained. Make long-term architecture part of your commercial discussions, reserve budget for systematic refactoring, and measure success by how quickly teams can deliver new value – not by how many fires they extinguish. Reducing technical debt isn’t an expense; it’s an investment in sustainable business growth.

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