Sometimes the best fix is simply not adding to the problem

Alysha Khan • public
• 2 min read

Welcome to the very first edition of Campaign Confessionals!

All of us in marketing operations have this giant toolkit in our heads that we often reach into like a fancy bag of magic tricks whenever we need to solve a problem. What I want to do every week with this newsletter is to add one more tool to your magic toolbox.

This week, I want to talk about the absolutely fascinating topic of...

Technical debt dun dun dun!

Because whenever I encounter the phrase technical debt, I imagine it as this big, scary, monstrous thing that's lurking in a company's tech stack just waiting to bring it all crashing down at some point.

A metaphorical Godzilla of duct tape and haphazard logic and untamed integrations.

But to make sure we are all on the same page, let's use this definition from Gartner:

Gartner defines technical debt as work that is “owed” to an IT system when teams “borrow” against long-term quality by making short-term sacrifices, taking shortcuts, or using workarounds to meet delivery deadlines. These debts can impact system performance, scalability, or resilience.
Technical debt can also accrue when teams delay regular system maintenance. Eventually, the amount of technical debt makes the software unstable and leads to customer dissatisfaction, as well as potentially higher support costs.

In short, technical debt = unnecessary short-cuts and workarounds + putting off maintenance. But doesn't that just sound like the normal temptation and traps we fall into every day?

This week, I'm starting my own business. Which means I'm opening a lot of new accounts. And saving a lot of new files.

And resisting the temptation EVERY DAMN TIME to take a shortcut because Future Alysha is going to be mighty pissed if she has to fix yet another silly, avoidable problem.

And this is just little old me, bumbling around my own personal little tech stack.

In your company, think about the number of tools and processes and then the number of people who have managed them in the past, present, and future, and then think about the sheer number of big and small choices all of these people need to make for all of these tools and processes day in and day out.

It's a lot. A lot, a lot. And to avoid technical debt, folks need to be making good decisions consistently at an organization that supports good decision-making. That's rare.

Plus, the more complex a system, the easier it is for a few shortcut decisions, not even an outright bad decision, just a suboptimal decision, to have a crazy ricochet butterfly effect up and down the tech stack.

So in truth, for the vast majority of us in marketing operations, technical debt is going to be a fact of life as we progress through our careers.

Tips for the coming week

  1. Try to find one moment this week where you can make a good decision for your future self and not contribute to a problem. Because sometimes the bar is not How do I fix the problem?. The bar is How do I not contribute to the problem? and that's a perfectly okay standard to have.
  2. In Marketing Ops, we tend to be a little, let's say, judgy of the people who have come before us and contributed to the various technical debt problems we run into. When you run into an issue this week that is clearly the result of technical debt, take a minute and think kind thoughts about the person who created this debt. They were probably just one person making one poor choice on one bad day and it has unfortunately cascaded out in a really big way that's impacting you. We're all out here just trying our best :)

See you next week,

🫶🏽 Alysha

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