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Technical Debt for Product Managers: How to Identify, Assess, Prioritize, and Justify Technical Debt Against New Features.
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Oct 25 2026
Pages: 274
Weight: 0.81
Height: 0.58 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
How Much Is Technical Debt Holding Back Your Product's Evolution?
New features are taking longer and longer to develop, Engineering teams are warning about technical risks, and seemingly simple improvements are turning into complex projects. Accumulated technical debt may be behind these challenges as software evolves.
For Product Managers, understanding technical debt is essential to making informed decisions about priorities, investments, and the product roadmap. Its consequences affect development speed, product quality, user experience, and the ability to introduce new features.
Technical Debt for Product Managers is a practical guide to understanding how technical debt accumulates, identifying its consequences, and learning how to manage it alongside Engineering teams, without requiring advanced programming knowledge.
What Will You Learn in This Book?
Understand technical debt: What it is, how it accumulates, and how it differs from bugs, maintenance, and other technical improvements.
Identify its consequences: Recognize signs of accumulating debt, understand its impact on development, and spot risks before they become problems.
Assess and prioritize: Estimate costs, analyze risks, and compare technical initiatives with new features using prioritization criteria and frameworks.
Manage technical debt with Engineering: Understand refactoring, rewrites, and incremental improvements, plan technical interventions, and evaluate their outcomes.
Integrate it into the roadmap: Decide when to address technical debt, how much effort to allocate, and how to balance it with business needs.
Justify technical investments: Communicate the consequences of technical debt to stakeholders, build business cases, and make evidence-based decisions.
Build sustainable products: Make technical debt management part of regular planning and prevent its consequences from limiting product growth.
Throughout the book, you'll follow the evolution of Mercato, an e-commerce platform, where Product and Engineering teams face realistic decisions involving promotions, payments, checkout, scalability, and new features. Examples and practical case studies demonstrate how to apply these concepts to everyday product management challenges.
You'll also find practical resources for documenting, assessing, and prioritizing technical debt, along with a final case study that brings together the book's key lessons.
A book for Product Managers, Product Owners, and product professionals who want to collaborate more effectively with Engineering, understand the implications of technical decisions, and build digital products that can evolve sustainably.
Speak the same language as Engineering and make better product decisions.
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