Picture this: It's late 2026. Your engineering team has a good practice in AI-assisted coding that writes clean, tested code in minutes. Your product team has AI that drafts comprehensive PRDs from a few bullet points. Your design team has AI that generates polished prototypes in no time. PRDs come in hot. Features go out almost as quickly. Your velocity metrics are up 300%. And yet. Teams are frustrated. The backlog is overflowing with conflicting priorities. Nobody's quite

I was thinking recently about a time in my career when everything felt in flow. Not just for me, but for the entire product organization. We weren't necessarily working longer hours. We weren't using some revolutionary methodology. We weren't even particularly well-resourced. But something was fundamentally different. I had theories about what made that period special, but I wanted to test my assumptions. So I reached out to colleagues from that time and asked them: What do y

When I suggested this article topic to my engineering partners here, they bristled. Good. That tension is exactly why we need to have this conversation. They were concerned that I was pushing back on the need for technical investment work. I wasn't. I was pushing back on the lack of precision in how we talk about it. And that distinction matters. The Problem with "Tech Debt" A few years ago I was helping a team that was battling incident after incident. Each outage expanded t