Article · 20 min read

Bottlenecks of Scaleups: Tech Debt

Tim Cochran and Carl Nygard · martinfowler.com Free Advanced

This lays out when accumulated shortcuts actually start slowing a growing company down, versus when they are just cosmetic. It gives you language to tell your co-founder the difference between debt that is costing you real velocity and debt that is only annoying. Use it to pressure test whether your no-code setup is genuinely blocking growth.

  • Measure tech debt by the velocity it costs, not by how ugly it looks
  • Debt only matters once it blocks a thing you are trying to do now
  • Address the specific bottleneck rather than rebuilding everything
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It answers 2 questions

  1. We ship fast but our codebase is turning into a mess. How much should a two-person startup care about tech debt?
  2. I built my MVP on no-code but my technical co-founder wants to rewrite it in real code. When is that migration actually worth it?

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