Your CFO Will Love This: A Framework for Prioritizing E-commerce Tech Debt by Business Impact
If you're looking for a comprehensive guide to cutting friction, killing tech debt, and scaling your mid-market brand, my new book, The Ecommerce Growth Playbook, is for you. It’s packed with actionable frameworks and real-world case studies to help you break through growth plateaus. You can find it in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle editions on Amazon.
It’s 6:00 AM on Black Friday, and my phone is ringing. It’s a CMO in a full-blown panic. Her company’s biggest promotion of the year, the one they’d planned for months, isn’t working. Social media is on fire with complaints from customers whose promo codes are failing at checkout. I log in to see what’s going on and find the culprit: an old, forgotten piece of code in their promotion engine. It was a “temporary” fix put in place by a developer who left years ago. In that moment, watching revenue flatline during the most important sales day of the year, I was reminded of a hard truth: technical debt is the silent killer of margin. You can’t see it on a balance sheet, but it quietly warps every single metric on your dashboard. 1
What Tech Debt is Actually Costing You (In Dollars, Not Code)
Let’s get one thing straight. Technical debt isn’t just a problem for your IT department; it’s a business problem that shows up as an invisible tax on your revenue. 1 It’s the sum of all the shortcuts, the "we'll fix it later" decisions, and the quick-and-dirty patches made to hit a deadline. 1
In the short term, these choices feel necessary. But over time, they accrue interest. 1
That interest doesn’t look like a line item from the bank. It looks like a slow-loading checkout page that causes customers to abandon their carts. It looks like inflated maintenance costs because your developers spend half their time fighting fires in a fragile system. It looks like the massive opportunity cost of not being able to launch a new feature because your platform is too brittle to touch. 1
The scale of this problem is staggering. Across the United States, tech debt is estimated to cost businesses about $1.5 trillion a year. 1 For a single company, it can mean that 10-20% of the budget for new technology is actually spent just dealing with the problems of the old technology. 1 Developers can spend up to a third of their time on rework and maintenance caused by debt. 1 Think about that. A huge chunk of your team’s salary is going toward paying the interest on past shortcuts instead of building the future.
The Creatuity Tech Debt Scoring Framework: A Tool for Your Leadership Team
So, how do you get a handle on this invisible monster? When you have a backlog of hundreds of technical issues, it’s easy to feel paralyzed. That’s why my team developed a simple tool to cut through the noise: The Creatuity Tech Debt Scoring Framework. 1
This isn’t for developers to debate code purity. It’s a tool for business leaders to have a data-driven conversation about what to fix first to make the biggest impact on the bottom line.
It works by scoring every technical issue across three business-focused dimensions, each on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high): 1
Urgency (1–5): How badly is this hurting us right now? A bug that crashes the checkout process every day is a 5. It’s an active fire. An outdated design theme that looks a bit tired but still works might be a 1 or 2. It’s not causing immediate breakage. 1
Business Impact (1–5): If we fixed this, what would be the effect on revenue, customer experience, or efficiency? The broken promotion engine on Black Friday had a massive business impact, a clear 5. An admin panel glitch that only affects an internal report might be a 1. 1
Complexity (1–5): How hard is this to fix? Is it a quick change, or does it require a major project? Removing a single unused line of code is a 1. Replacing a core integration with your ERP could be a 5. 1
Once you score your list of issues, the priorities become crystal clear. You can plot them on a simple four-quadrant matrix to see what you need to do. 1 This turns a messy, emotional debate into a straightforward action plan.
How to Run Your First Tech Debt Triage Meeting
This framework becomes truly powerful when you turn it into a regular meeting with your team. Here’s a simple agenda to run your first tech debt triage session.
Step 1: Identify the Debt
Before the meeting, gather a list of potential debt items. This should be a mix of quantitative and qualitative inputs. On the quantitative side, you can use tools to scan your code for issues. 1
But don’t forget the qualitative side. This is where you uncover what I call "platform smell." It’s the intuitive sense that a part of your system is brittle or being avoided. Ask your team one simple question: "What parts of our site are you afraid to touch?" 1 The answers will be a goldmine. Maybe everyone avoids the CMS’s bundling feature because it’s known to cause crashes. That’s platform smell, and it’s a huge red flag for tech debt. 1
Step 2: Score as a Team
In the meeting, go through the list item by item and score them together. It’s important to have both business and technical people in the room. A developer can speak to the Complexity, but your marketing manager is the one who can tell you the true Business Impact of a broken feature. This collaborative scoring ensures you get a holistic view.
Step 3: Prioritize and Act
With your list scored, you can now map it onto a prioritization matrix. 1 The picture will be clear:
Quick Wins (High Impact, Low Complexity): These are the things you should tackle immediately. They deliver a big return for minimal effort. 1
Strategic Projects (High Impact, High Complexity): These are the big, important initiatives that require planning and budget. The scoring helps you make the business case for them.
Fill-in Tasks (Low Impact, Low Complexity): These are minor fixes you can batch together and knock out when time allows.
Consciously Defer (Low Impact, High Complexity): These are the issues you can agree to live with for now. You’ve acknowledged them, but made a conscious choice not to spend resources on them yet.
This process transforms an overwhelming backlog into a clear, actionable roadmap that your entire team can understand and support.
Your First Three Fixes: Low-Hanging Fruit That Boosts Margin
To get you started, here are a couple of common "quick wins" that often come out of the first triage meeting. These are simple fixes that can have an immediate positive effect on your business.
1. Restore Native Features
I often find that merchants have paid for expensive custom code to replicate something their e-commerce platform already does out of the box. A previous agency might have built a custom promotions module, not realizing the native one could do the job. That custom code is now a piece of tech debt you have to maintain. A quick win is to audit these areas and, where possible, remove the custom hack and restore the platform’s native functionality. This simplifies your codebase and reduces future maintenance costs. 1
2. Remove Unused Extensions and Code
Your site is likely carrying around dead weight in the form of old plugins, modules, or code that is no longer in use. Every piece of code is a potential point of failure and adds a little bit of performance overhead. Go through your extensions and your codebase and prune anything that isn’t providing value. I’ve seen sites get a noticeable speed boost just by uninstalling a dozen old extensions that were still loading scripts on every page. It’s digital spring cleaning, and it’s one of the easiest ways to reduce complexity and risk. 1
Conclusion
Managing technical debt isn’t a one-time project; it’s an ongoing business discipline, like managing financial debt. By making it visible and prioritizing it based on business impact, you can turn it from a silent margin killer into a manageable part of your growth strategy. You stop paying the invisible tax of slow performance and constant firefighting, and you start investing those resources back into innovation.
For a deeper look at the Tech Debt Scoring Framework, including downloadable worksheets and more real-world examples, check out my new book, The Ecommerce Growth Playbook. It’s designed to be a practical field guide for mid-market leaders who are ready to stop coasting and start scaling. You can grab your copy on Amazon today.
Works cited
The-Ecommerce-Growth-Playbook-Print.pdf
