At some point, almost every product-engineering team has reached the same unspoken agreement: Engineering gets 20% of the roadmap to clean things up, Product gets 80% for its features. Everyone leaves the meeting with something.
The problem is that this is not a solution. It is a ceasefire. And like every ceasefire, it resolves nothing. It just delays.
The deal that reassures everyone and institutionalises the problem
Tech debt is real. According to Forrester, more than half of tech decision-makers will see their tech debt reach a moderate or high severity level in 2025. And the cost figures are stark: 80% of the average software budget goes into maintenance, not into creating value.
Faced with that, the reflex is understandable. Dedicating a fixed budget to tech debt gives the impression of managing the problem. Engineering has its space. Product keeps its own. Social peace is preserved.
What the deal actually produces is an institutionalised separation between two logics that should be one: what the market demands, and what the team can deliver. Engineering optimises for technical quality in its lane. Product optimises for features in its own. And the founder watches the growth metrics wondering why the tech budget tripled without revenue following.
The real problem is not the debt. It is the conversation that never happens.
The source of the dysfunction is simpler to name than to fix. Engineering needs to explain its constraints in business terms. Product needs to understand why some features cost three times what they appear to cost. That conversation does not happen, not out of bad faith, but because both sides speak different languages and nobody holds the role of translator.
There is an aggravating factor that few founders anticipate: generative AI.
AI-assisted development tools let teams ship faster, which is good news for velocity and bad news for debt. Code produced faster without rigorous architectural oversight is debt accumulated faster. If the fundamentals are solid, AI becomes an accelerator. If the practices are flawed, it reproduces defects at scale.
The 20% budget dedicated to debt does not grow at the same pace as the team's velocity. The gap widens.
Does dedicating 20% of the roadmap to tech debt force that conversation? No. It bypasses it. Engineering no longer needs to convince Product of the importance of a refactor; it has its budget. Product no longer needs to understand the technical implications of a feature; Engineering handles it in its lane. The deal replaces the dialogue.
The real question the deal avoids: are this team's technical decisions aligned with the business objectives of the next quarter? Not on code quality. On pipeline, churn, retention.
What this means concretely for a Series A founder
At this stage, investors expect a readable correlation between spending and growth. A founder who cannot explain the ROI of their tech budget to the board does not have a tech debt problem. They have an alignment problem. And a roadmap percentage negotiated in a planning meeting does not produce that alignment.
What real alignment produces is a unified roadmap where every sprint, including technical work, is connected to a measurable business objective. Not "we refactor the payment module" but "we refactor the payment module because it is blocking integration with the three enterprise prospects in our pipeline." Tech debt becomes a business argument, not a quota.
That is the type of structuring Nightborn puts in place with growth-stage teams: identifying which technical decisions have a direct impact on the metrics that matter, and rebuilding prioritisation around those decisions, sprint by sprint, without reorganisation, without additional debt. In practice, this starts with a business-oriented feature prioritisation review, before any roadmap decision is made.
Our conclusion on tech debt
The 20% deal is not useless. It is better than nothing. But if the objective is to show the board a clear correlation between tech investment and growth, what is needed is not a debt budget. It is a shared reading framework between Product and Engineering on what actually generates value.
Without that, the founder keeps investing in a team that optimises for the wrong things. With the best engineers in Belgium. And a competitor with half the budget shipping twice as fast. If you recognise that pattern, the first conversation starts here.
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