How do I justify a debt budget to my CFO and CRO?

Translate it into DORA improvements and revenue protection. Show how a 20% capacity allocation yielded a 23% cloud cost reduction, 88% MTTR drop, and 3-pt NRR lift. That’s less discounting, fewer churn drivers, and reclaimed roadmap capacity. Treat it like capex with measurable payback, not a science project.

Won’t a debt focus slow down feature delivery?

Done right, it speeds you up. We stabilize deploys (canaries + auto-rollback), shorten CI, and reduce on-call toil first. Teams ship more often with less fear. In this case study, deploy frequency increased from 2/week to 25/day during the same quarter.

We’re in hypergrowth—how do we start without a moratorium on features?

Time-box a 90-day intervention with a 20% debt budget. Prioritize fixes that unlock speed and safety: CI under 15 minutes, SLOs with burn alerts, right-sized K8s, and the top 3 DB hotspots. You don’t need a freeze; you need guardrails.

What metrics should we track weekly?

DORA (deploy frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR), SLO burn rate, alert volume, top incident categories, CI duration, and infra cost/unit (per req or per tenant). Visualize trend deltas; celebrate wins to protect the debt budget.

Case-studies · Oct 4, 2025 · 10 minute read

The Debt Diet That Saved a Rocket Ship: Cutting MTTR 88% and Doubling Deploys in 90 Days

A Series B startup was scaling like crazy and bleeding reliability. We halted the spiral by treating technical debt like real debt—with a budget, an owner, and a paydown plan—without slowing feature velocity.

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The Debt Diet That Saved a Rocket Ship: Cutting MTTR 88% and Doubling Deploys in 90 Days

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist