Stop saying “technical debt”.

Here’s the effect: the minute we trot out the term “tech debt,” everyone is upset but no one is listening. Each conversant assumes they know what we’re all talking about, but their individual pictures differ quite a bit. It sounds to the business like the engineers are asking for three weeks free from the obligation to release any features. They remember the last time they granted those weeks: within a month the team was underwater again. When businesspeople don’t want to grant a “tech debt week” because they saw with their own eyeballs that the last one improved the team’s capacity zero percent, how can we expect them to grant us another one with alacrity?