You sell a tech-debt register to my board. Show me your own technical debt register.?

The full executive answer

Fair challenge, and I will answer it in two parts. Yes, the product ships a Tech-Debt Intelligence module — customers get a per-organisation register of debt items with severity, remediation approach, effort, and AI-assisted prioritisation. We built it because boards never see engineering debt until it becomes an outage or a delayed roadmap.

Our own debt is tracked with the same honesty, in the repository itself rather than a slide. The README carries an explicit honest-gaps section — no SOC 2 yet, single region, no DR drill yet, no load history — and our working agreement for development mandates a loop discipline: verify a gap is real, build the smallest correct fix, pass the full quality gate, merge; and never claim a score the merged code does not support. Known debt is written down where the engineers work, not hidden in a wiki.

Concrete current items I will name unprompted: the availability and API-latency monitoring gap (targets defined in code, probes not yet wired), the unprovisioned second region, and the security audit debt — npm audit runs in CI on every push but is currently advisory rather than build-blocking, which is a deliberate pre-launch trade-off with a hardening date. A team that can name its debt precisely is managing it; per the DORA research, that transparency correlates with delivery performance far better than pretending to zero debt.