Technical Debt - OKRs

Engineering talks about technical debt all the time, Is your business leadership aware of it and its gravity?

Frame debt OKRs as business outcomes

Instead of Refactor module X, write OKRs like:

"Reduce average lead time for change in service foo from 5 days to 3 days."

"Cut auth-related incidents from 4/month to 1/month."

Then engineer-level initiatives (refactoring, additional tests, New observability tasks) are the levers to hit those OKRs.

Technical debt payment is now a means to a quantified business end.