How do you choose which technical debt to pay first?

Score debt by business impact, not aesthetics. We use four numbers: change failure rate, MTTR, lead time, and cost per SLO. Anything that improves deploy safety (GitOps, canaries) and time‑to‑rollback usually wins in the first 90 days.

Do we need a full platform team to adopt GitOps and SLOs?

No. In this case, 2 SREs and 1 Staff Eng did the heavy lift. Start with one golden path service, templatize it, and scale by copying the pattern—not by inventing a platform.

What about AI‑generated code—ban it or embrace it?

Treat AI like a junior pair: useful scaffolding, untrustworthy defaults. Keep it, but gate it with linters, coverage, and architectural rules. Then refactor duplicated helpers into a hardened library.

Will canaries slow us down?

They speed you up. Automated promotion + rollback removes human bottlenecks and reduces blast radius. Median lead time dropped from 21 days to 2 days once canaries and GitOps were standard.

Case-studies · Nov 12, 2025 · 9 minute read

From 1 Deploy/Week to 20/Day: The 90‑Day Tech Debt Cut That Paid for Itself

A high‑growth startup was burning cash and engineers. We killed the debt, tightened the loop, and turned release fear into release fuel—in one quarter.

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From 1 Deploy/Week to 20/Day: The 90‑Day Tech Debt Cut That Paid for Itself

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist