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Engineering

Tech Debt Triage

Rank tech debt by impact and effort. Quick wins, long-haul fixes, ignore-for-now buckets.

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Pick one. Copy to paste straight away, or download tech-debt-triage.md to keep.

Step 2

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Quarterly ritual. Tech debt that does not get scored gets ignored. Pair with sprint planning.

Preview the skill· what gets copied
Triage this tech debt list.

Tech debt items (paste raw): {{LIST}}
Team size: {{NUMBER}}
Sprint capacity for debt %: {{X}}
Top 3 product goals next quarter: {{GOALS}}

Score each item:
- Impact (1 to 5): incident risk, dev velocity, customer pain
- Effort (1 to 5): hours, complexity, blast radius
- Strategic fit (Y / N): blocks a product goal?

Output 4 buckets:
1. Quick wins (high impact, low effort) — do this sprint
2. Big rocks (high impact, high effort) — schedule into roadmap
3. Slow burn (low impact, low effort) — Friday afternoons
4. Ignore (low impact, high effort) — write off

For each item in buckets 1 to 3: owner, deadline, 1-line plan.

Works with: Claude · Claude Code · ChatGPT · Cursor · Any model

By Rishi Jain