As tech companies grow and age you begin to feel the debt you’re acquiring, not financial debt, but technical and design debt. Debt is acquired by building for the short-term. The interest accrued is the amount of time to manage, repair, rewrite, and build upon the poorly written and designed code.

Design debt is acquired by design teams creating non-reusable solutions for isolated problems. Design debt is made up of an over abundance of non-reusable and inconsistent styles, treatments, and interactions and the interest is the impossible task of their management and modification.

Debt is a weight around your neck. Its existence cost time, resources, and risk which prevents quality products from being built at a timely pace. By having a system, and yielding to it, we’re able to move more quickly and build better products.