The hardest part about technical debt isn't fixing it—it’s explaining it to non-technical stakeholders. Product Managers care about feature velocity, not messy code. If we want to prevent this paralysis, engineers need to translate tech debt into business currency. Instead of saying 'the codebase is messy,' we have to say 'Refactoring this today unlocks a 3x increase in feature velocity next quarter.' That’s how you get the budget to fix it.