Have you ever spent too long building a feature only to find out that it did not contribute to the business goals? Have your team members been fighting tech debt and thought there must be a better way to manage it? Let me talk to you about how my team built revenue-generating features in hours with zero tech debt.

Every development team has suffered from Technical Debt, and most developers love refactoring these issues into the early hours, like an accountant making sure the books balance on Christmas Eve.

Sometimes, though, software teams can focus too much on technical debt rather than key business metrics, or sometimes we focus too much on features and not enough on software architecture, which will come back to bite the business later on. When thousands are trying to build startups, and businesses are trying to move rapidly, how can we balance acquiring technical debt and feature delivery. Simple! Stop seeing it as debt.

What I am going to propose goes hand-in-hand with Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup (2011). One of the key takeaways from Lean Startup was to validate your hypothesis by using minimum value products (I know this is 2018, and here I am still talking about MVPs). As a development team, you could build software as if you were running an experiment, have a clear hypothesis and measure to see if your assertions were correct.