菜单
Help users manage technical debt strategically. Use when someone is dealing with legacy code, planning refactoring work, deciding between rewrites vs. incremental fixes, trying to get buy-in for tech debt reduction, or balancing new features with maintenance.
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基于 SOC 职业分类
Help users create and run AI evaluations. Use when someone is building evals for LLM products, measuring model quality, creating test cases, designing rubrics, or trying to systematically measure AI output quality.
Help users define AI product strategy. Use when someone is building an AI product, deciding where to apply AI in their product, planning an AI roadmap, evaluating build vs buy for AI capabilities, or figuring out how to integrate AI into existing products.
Help users synthesize and act on customer feedback. Use when someone is analyzing NPS responses, processing support tickets, reviewing user research, synthesizing feedback from multiple channels, or trying to identify patterns in customer input.
Help users apply behavioral science to product design. Use when someone is designing for habit formation, reducing friction, applying psychology to UX, increasing retention through behavioral principles, or using nudges to influence user behavior.
Help users craft compelling brand narratives. Use when someone is defining brand strategy, writing company positioning, creating pitch narratives, developing messaging frameworks, or trying to make their company story more memorable.
Help users get promoted at work. Use when someone is preparing for a promotion conversation, building their case for advancement, trying to understand what's blocking their promotion, or figuring out how to get to the next level in their career.
| name | managing-tech-debt |
| description | Help users manage technical debt strategically. Use when someone is dealing with legacy code, planning refactoring work, deciding between rewrites vs. incremental fixes, trying to get buy-in for tech debt reduction, or balancing new features with maintenance. |
Help the user manage technical debt strategically using insights from 18 product leaders.
When the user asks for help with tech debt:
Camille Fournier: "Engineers notoriously, notoriously, notoriously, massively underestimate the migration time for old system to new system. By the way, you still have to support the old system while you're working on the new system." Full rewrites are traps. Prefer incremental evolution - uplift specific components rather than starting from scratch.
Ebi Atawodi: "Infrastructure is the product. Period. I cannot build a skyscraper on a shaky foundation. So it is your problem too - it's not for the engineer to be barging on the door." Technical debt should be owned by PMs as "product debt," not treated as an engineering-only concern. Include it in your Top 10 Problems list.
Gaurav Misra: "As a startup your job is to take on technical debt because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company." Debt is leverage - evaluate if a problem can be solved by a future hire rather than today. But monitor the "interest" - if maintenance takes 80-90% of time, you've run out of runway.
Farhan Thawar: "We have a Delete Code Club. We can almost always find a million-plus lines of code to delete. Everything gets easier - the codebase loads faster, it's easier to understand." Create dedicated time or teams focused solely on removing unused code. Deletion improves velocity and clarity.
Matt Mullenweg: "You can see [tech debt] in the interface or how their products integrate with themselves." Fragmented UIs and poor integration between features are user-facing symptoms of accumulated debt. Look for inconsistencies to identify where debt has accumulated.
Casey Winters: "The most impactful projects are the hardest to measure, so they get chronically underfunded. Build custom metrics to show the value, run small tests that prove the worthwhile-ness of the investment." Create custom metrics and run experiments to demonstrate business value. Align with engineering and design to present a unified front.
Geoff Charles: "We don't have a bug backlog. We fix every bug once they're surfaced almost." Assign bugs directly to the engineer on call to ensure immediate pain awareness. Bug backlogs become graveyards.
Eeke de Milliano: "Sometimes teams are just getting bogged down by urgent work - too much tech debt, bugs, instability. There's no way they can focus on bigger, creative stuff if they're heads-down dealing with incidents all day." Diagnose when a team is stuck in a "hierarchy of needs" trap. Prioritize debt reduction to free up headspace for creative work.
Julia Schottenstein: "We would be so lucky to have tech debt because that means people are using the product. What we didn't need at launch was a distributed scheduler - we had no users." Build the simplest, most naive version first. Accept debt as a trade-off for getting product into users' hands.
Melanie Perkins: "We thought it would take six months... it took two years of not shipping any product." Major rewrites are "dark tunnels" that stall shipping. If you must do them, gamify the work to maintain team momentum during the long slog.
Austin Hay: "Think one to two years down the road about what we're going to need. When setting up tools, ask: 'What happens a year from now if I don't change anything?'" Implement foundational elements like SSO or proper data schemas early to avoid catastrophic migrations later.
For all 20 insights from 18 guests, see references/guest-insights.md
