Design and product work
Technical debt
Also calledTech debt, Non-functional requirements, NFRs
The future cost created by taking shortcuts in code or architecture: work that will have to be redone, and that slows everything built on top of it until it is.
Ward Cunningham coined the metaphor in 1992: like financial debt, a shortcut lets you move faster now, but you pay interest on it every time you work in that area until you pay it back.
Non-functional requirements, such as performance, reliability and security, are where much of it hides. They rarely appear on a roadmap until they fail, which is why someone on the product side has to own their priority alongside engineering.
Common mistake
Treating all debt as bad. Deliberate, recorded debt taken on to learn something quickly is a reasonable trade. The expensive kind is the debt nobody knows about.