Bottlenecks of Scaleups: How did you get tech debt?

In its early days, a startup searches for a good product-market fit. When it finds one it looks to grow rapidly, a phase known as a scaleup. At this time it's growing rapidly along many dimensions: revenues, customer, headcount. At Thoughtworks, we've worked with many such scaleups, and our work has focused on how to help them overcome various bottlenecks that impede this growth. As we've done this work, my colleagues have noticed common bottlenecks, and learned approaches to deal with them.

This article, by Tim Cochran and Carl Nygard, is the first in a series that examines these bottlenecks, in this case looking at the problem of a startup accumulating technical debt. This bottleneck is a common one, and like most bottlenecks it isn't necessarily due to bad work so far, but more due to the change of context that rapid growth imposes on a company. We begin the article by explaining how this bottleneck appears and what the key signs are the bottleneck is slowing progress.

more… https://martinfowler.com/articles/bottlenecks-of-scaleups/01-tech-debt.html