Here’s a take that contradicts everything you've been taught about building products fast.
Some of the best decisions you made early on are now the reason you can't close enterprise deals the year after.
Because there's a specific moment between finding product-market fit and scaling past it where the thing that accelerated you becomes the thing anchoring you.
The solution isn't just fixing the code. It's how you approach the fixes, and what you ship while fixing them. ⬇️
💸 Two kinds of technical debt
Strategic debt looks like this:
Hard-coded content that could live in a CMS. Inline styles before a design system. Manual admin workflows you could automate.
Shortcuts like these buy speed without mortgaging your future. Easy to spot, predictable to fix, costs grow linearly.
Toxic debt looks different.
It's the component architecture you didn't establish, the navigation structure that worked fine for two tiers, the state management pattern you copied from a tutorial.
These felt like pragmatism when you made them. Now they compound exponentially.
🧱 The wall
Most startups stall between $10K and $50K MRR because early adopters tolerate friction that mainstream users don't, and the architecture that got you to initial validation can't support features enterprise buyers need.
Velocity collapses first. Teams spend 40 to 50 percent of their time on unplanned work: bug fixes, workarounds, and fighting their own codebase. Two-day changes now take two weeks.
Then deals start dying. A prospect asks about single sign-on. You realise your architecture can't support it for six months without rebuilding authentication entirely.
🚆 The UX approach: parallel tracks
The mistake most teams make: treating technical debt as purely an engineering problem. Stop everything, fix the foundation, then resume shipping.
That's how you lose six months and your product direction.
Better approach: run two things in parallel.
➡️ Track 1: Focused interventions
Target specific architectural bottlenecks blocking enterprise features.
This is where UX teams add value you may not expect. They help you prioritise by asking: which issues actually block user value? Navigation breaking at enterprise scale? Fix it. Messy component library that still works? Defer it.
➡️ Track 2: Keep learning
While engineering fixes the foundation, UX-backed teams get you shipping fast again, just differently.
Prototype new enterprise features with low-code tools. Run research to validate what buyers actually need. Test navigation changes, onboarding flows, pricing structures without touching the problematic architecture.
When the refactoring finishes, you have validated direction from real user data.
You're shipping fast again – with prototypes and experiments instead of production code.
Why UX-backed teams do this better
Because they're trained to validate quickly without production engineering. Figma prototypes to test navigation. Wizard-of-Oz features that validate demand. Lightweight implementations that answer "would users actually use this?"
While your architecture gets fixed, your product direction gets sharper.
You avoid a trap so easy to fall into: spending six months fixing debt, then building the wrong features because you stopped learning what users need.
Small companies spend 27 percent of their IT budget servicing technical debt. Enterprises spend 41 percent.
The difference is whether you keep learning while fixing it.
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