The Innovation Tax is the percentage of engineering capacity spent maintaining instead of building.
Innovation Tax = Maintenance Hours / Total Hours × 100
Healthy: below 40%. Warning: 40-60%. Critical: 60-80%. Insolvent: above 80%.
Track this weekly. If it's trending upward, your debt is compounding faster than your team can manage it. Every 10% increase in Innovation Tax corresponds to roughly 15% slower feature delivery.
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9 minPublished Work
This article expands on ideas from my published work in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon. View published articles →
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