Tag: techdebt

The 3-Headed Monster of SaaS Growth: Innovation, Tech Debt, and the Compliance Black Hole

The 3-Headed Monster of SaaS Growth: Innovation, Tech Debt, and the Compliance Black Hole

By | | Comments 0 Comment

Picture this: your SaaS startup is on the verge of launching a game-changing feature. The demo with a major enterprise client is tomorrow. The team is working late, pushing final commits. Then it happens—a build breaks due to legacy code dependencies, and a critical security vulnerability is flagged. If that weren’t enough, the client just requested proof of ISO27001 certification before signing the contract. Suddenly, your momentum stalls.

Welcome to the 3-Headed Monster every scaling SaaS team faces:

  1. Innovation Pressure – Build fast or get left behind.
  2. Technical Debt – Every shortcut accumulates hidden costs.
  3. Compliance Black Hole – SOC 2, ISO27001, GDPR—all non-negotiables for enterprise growth.

Moderne’s recent $30M funding round to tackle technical debt is a signal: investors understand that unresolved code debt isn’t just an engineering nuisance—it’s a business risk. But addressing tech debt is only part of the battle. Winning in SaaS requires taming all three heads.

Head #1: The Relentless Demand for Innovation

In the hyper-competitive SaaS world, the mantra is clear: ship fast, or someone else will. Product-market fit waits for no one. Pressure mounts from investors, users, and competitors. Startups often prioritise speed over structure—a rational choice, but one that can quickly unravel as they scale.

As Founder of Zerberus.ai (and with past VP Eng experience at two high-growth startups), I saw us sprint ahead with rapid feature development, often knowing we were incurring technical and security debt. The goal was simple—get there first. But over time, those early shortcuts turned into roadblocks.

Increasingly, the modern CTO is no longer just a builder but a strategic leader driving business outcomes. According to McKinsey (2023), CTOs are evolving from traditional technology custodians into orchestrators of resilience, security, and scalability. This evolution means CTOs must now balance the pressure to innovate with the need to future-proof systems against both technical and security debt.

Head #2: Technical Debt – The Silent Killer

Every startup understands technical debt, but few realise its full cost until it’s too late. It slows feature releases, increases defect rates, and leads to developer burnout. More critically, it introduces security vulnerabilities.

A 2020 report by the Consortium for Information & Software Quality (CISQ) estimated that poor software quality cost U.S. businesses $2.41 trillion, with technical debt being a major contributor. This loss of velocity directly impacts innovation and time to market.

GreySpark Partners (2023) highlights that over 60% of firms struggle with technology debt, impacting their ability to innovate. Alarmingly, they found that 71% of respondents believed their technology debt would negatively affect their firm’s competitiveness in the next five years.

The Spring4Shell vulnerability in 2022 was a stark reminder—outdated dependencies can expose your entire stack. Moderne’s approach—automating large-scale refactoring—is promising because it acknowledges a core truth: technical debt isn’t just a productivity issue; it’s a security and revenue risk.

Head #3: The Compliance Black Hole

ISO27001, SOC 2, GDPR. These aren’t just badges of honour; they are the price of admission for enterprise deals. Yet compliance often blindsides startups. It’s seen as a box-ticking exercise, rushed through to close deals. But achieving compliance is only the beginning—staying compliant is the real challenge.

A Deloitte (2023) study found that organisations with mature governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) programmes experience fewer regulatory breaches and lower compliance costs. Furthermore, McKinsey (2023) highlights that cybersecurity in the AI era requires embedding security into product development as early as possible, as threats evolve in tandem with technological progress.

I’ve been in rooms where six-figure deals were delayed because we didn’t have the right certifications. In other cases, a sudden audit exposed weak controls, forcing an all-hands firefight. Compliance isn’t just a legal requirement; it’s a potential growth blocker.

Where the 3 Heads Collide

These challenges are deeply interconnected:

  • Innovation leads to technical debt.
  • Technical debt creates security vulnerabilities.
  • Security gaps jeopardise compliance.

This vicious cycle can trap startups in firefighting mode. The solution lies in convergence:

  • Automate code health (e.g., Moderne).
  • Embed security into development (Shift Left, SAST, Dependency Scanning).
  • Integrate compliance into engineering workflows (continuous compliance).

Forward-thinking teams realise that innovation, security, and compliance are not separate lanes; they are parallel tracks that must move in sync.

The Future: Taming the Monster

Investors are betting on platforms that tackle technical debt and automate security posture. The future CTO will not just manage code velocity; they will oversee code health, security, and compliance as a unified system.

Winning in SaaS is no longer just about shipping fast—it’s about shipping fast, securely, and in compliance. The real winners will tame all three heads.

At Zerberus.ai—founded by engineers and security experts from high-growth SaaS startups like Zarget and Itilite—we are exploring how startups can simplify security compliance while enabling rapid development. We’re currently in private beta, partnering with SaaS teams tackling these challenges.

Trivia: Our logo, inspired by Cerberus—the mythical three-headed guardian of the underworld—embodies this very struggle. Each head symbolises the core challenges startups face: Innovation, Technical Debt, and Compliance. Zerberus.ai is built to help startups tame each of these heads, ensuring that rapid growth doesn’t come at the expense of security or scalability.

How are you navigating the 3-Headed Monster in your startup journey?

References and Further Reading

How to Manage Technical Debt in 2023: A Guide for Leadership

How to Manage Technical Debt in 2023: A Guide for Leadership

By | | Comments 0 Comment

In this article, I will summarise effective strategies and best practices to tackle tech debt head-on.

Technical debt is an inevitable reality in software development. But, it can be leveraged just like a financial loan/debt can help you achieve your goals, if managed properly.
It can be used to drive competitive advantage by allowing companies to launch new products and features faster, experiment with new technologies, and improve the scalability and performance of their systems. However, like all loans, it need to be “Repaid” properly and at the right time, failing on it will create a downward spiral.

If you’re not careful, technical debt can quickly become a major burden that slows down development and makes it difficult to add new features or even fix bugs in a timely manner.

We will discuss how to identify technical debt and the signs of poorly managed debt, and then provide a strategy for reducing it. We will also discuss what a healthy level of technical debt looks like and how leaders can use it to their advantage.

Good Tech Debt Vs Bad Tech Debt

Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, famously said:

Bad debt takes money out of your pocket, while good debt puts money in your pocket.

– Robert Kiyosaki

The same is true of tech debt.

Technical debt is the cost of not doing things the right way the first time. Good technical debt is accrued when you make trade-offs to meet deadlines or deliver new features quickly. Bad technical debt is accrued when you make poor decisions or cut corners.

Bad tech debt will probably make your PMs, Sales and CEO happy for a quarter or two. But after that, they will be asking why everything is behind schedule and dealing with customer complaints because things aren’t working properly.

Now that I have presented the obvious in a familiar “Quadrant”, you can actually skip the terminologies and definitions part of this article! 😀

For my verbal brethren, Which is the Tech Debt you’d need to ruthlessly hunt down to extinction? Obviously, it is the untracked, undocumented ones. And the ones which are dragging your team on a downward spiral (immaterial of whether it is tracked or not)

Why does your Tech Debt keep accumulating?

Before we can think about building a strategy to solve tech debt, we need to understand how it gets out of control in the first place.

It’s called “impact visibility”.

Fixing code debt issues is impossible if:

1, You’ve no record of what technical debt issues you have

2, You’ve got a backlog, but you can’t see which issues are related to what code

In both cases, you can’t prioritise tech debt over shipping new features.

We need to get more granular about what impacts these two tech debt cases above.

  • Issue invisibility — There’s no source of shared knowledge. Codebase health info is locked in (few) engineers’ heads.
  • No code quality culture — Shipping fast, whatever the cost, like it’s going out of fashion.
  • Poor process — Tech debt work sucks. Nobody likes creating Jira tickets. “Jira” has become a dirty word.
  • Low-time investment — Justifying the time to fix tech debt or to refactor is a constant uphill battle. After a point, engineers become silent!

Lack of context — Issues in Jira are a world away from the hard reality of the codebase. They’re not related in any way.

So what’s the source of this? Let’s talk strategy.

Spoiler… It’s about changing organisational culture and developer behaviour to track issues properly.

Creating a strategy to reduce technical debt

Track. Issues. Properly.

Good tech debt management starts with team-wide excellence at tracking issues.

You can’t have a tech debt strategy without tracking.

The engineering leader’s job is to make that “issue tracking” easy for your team. There is supposed to be a software for that – Jira, Asana, Rally or something of that sort.

The problem is, I’ve never believed they really get to the bottom of the problem, and after speaking with scores of engineers and leaders about it, they usually don’t either. My personal belief is most companies suffer on the velocity after their Jira rollout! It is a bit like,

No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.

Thomas L. Friedman – in The Lexus and the Olive Tree!

As a leader, You need to find a way to…

  • Show engineers when they’re working on code with tech debt, without them having to jump thru 3 hoops.
  • Make it really easy for team members to report tech debt.
  • Create a natural way to discuss codebase issues.
  • Integrate tech debt work into your workflows and involve PMs if required.

There are multiple ways to achieve this, the easiest is to not address it. Ie: not address it intentionally, just tweak your existing pipeline. This can be done by,

  • A very robust linting & integration to the IDE
  • Tighter Git rules for commits
  • SAST which runs on the pipeline
  • and can feed into the IDE
ESLint on VS Code

Prioritising impactful tech debt

At this point, it should be obvious, but prioritising the right issues is only possible if you’re tracking the impact of these “issues” and it could be direct or indirect (Dependency, Sequencing, Rework avoidance etc) .

Once you’ve got them, you should regularly and consistently use them to decide what to address. This usually happens during the backlog grooming or sprint planning sessions. But, this decision-making process needs to be strategic. Not at all tactical, ie: DO NOT delegate it to the whims and whimsicals of your TL/PM or even EM.

You or someone with a context of the organisation and position on sales, clients, revenue etc., should be doing this.

A good way to start is by choosing a theme each time you prioritise issues. For example, you could prioritise issues that…

  • Are impacting a specific feature you need to work on in the next quarter
  • Are impacting the customer’s UX
  • Are affecting efficiency/morale on the team
  • Are impacting the security posture

This is often straightforward if you’ve got high-quality issues that traceable to code and tagged as such.

Most people wonder how to get the time for these “Tasks”. I have two recommendations.

  • Take an entire sprint every quarter to repay the tech debt (Will need high-level buy-in, It is slightly harder to align your CXOs)
  • Allocate 15-20% of bandwidth in every sprint. (Easier to achieve buy-in from CXOs, harder to drive with engineers)

Engineers generally won’t prioritise tech debt work by themselves because of the conflict of interest/pressure of shipping fast. This was evident from multiple high velocity/impact software engineering teams including ones at AirBnb, Netflix and Spotify. A commitment to code refactoring and maintenance work should be endorsed and supported from the top and reinforced regularly.

How much Tech Debt can you take on?

Managing technical debt is like managing financial debt. You can use it to your advantage, but you need to be careful not to let it get out of control.

Your technical debt budget is the amount of technical debt that you are willing to take on in order to achieve your business goals. You should not try to solve all of your technical debt at once, but instead focus on the most important items.

Prudent technical debt is debt that you take on deliberately and knowingly, in order to achieve a specific goal. For example, you might take on technical debt to launch a new product quickly, or to add a new feature that is in high demand by your customers.

If you manage your technical debt properly, it can be a powerful tool for gaining a competitive advantage. However, if you let your technical debt get out of control, it can lead to serious problems, such as increased costs, delays, and security vulnerabilities.

Concluding remarks:

Technical debt is one of the most neglected areas of software development. It is often only given priority when it is too late and has already caused serious problems.

However, when leaders work together and develop a consistent and process-driven strategy, technical debt can be effectively managed.

The best engineering teams are constantly thinking about how to use their technical debt budget to their advantage.

References and Further Reading:

Bitnami