N9-10: Building a Technical Debt Dashboard
Creating an executive-ready, real-time view of technical debt across the organization.
🎯 What You'll Learn
- ✓ Design debt dashboards
- ✓ Select leading indicators
- ✓ Automate debt tracking
- ✓ Present to executives quarterly
Lesson 1: Dashboard Architecture
The Technical Debt Dashboard has four zones: (1) Health Score — a single 0-100 composite score reflecting overall debt health, (2) Financial Impact — debt-related costs in dollar terms (carrying cost, remediation backlog, EBITDA drag), (3) Velocity Impact — deployment frequency, lead time, and maintenance load trends, (4) Risk Register — top 5 debt-related risks with severity and probability.
A weighted average of maintenance load, deployment frequency, incident rate, and coverage.
Annual carrying cost, remediation backlog total, EBITDA margin impact.
All metrics shown with 4-quarter trend lines.
Design the 4-zone Technical Debt Dashboard for your organization. Define the composite health score formula.
Lesson 2: Automated Metrics Collection
Manual debt tracking dies within 2 quarters. Automate: pull deployment frequency from CI/CD, extract maintenance load from Jira/Linear labels, calculate test coverage from CI reports, and aggregate incident data from PagerDuty/ops. The dashboard should update weekly without human intervention.
Deployment frequency and lead time from GitHub Actions/Jenkins.
Standardized labels: "tech-debt," "maintenance," "bug-fix" on all tickets.
Dashboard refreshes every Monday morning before leadership standup.
Identify data sources for each dashboard metric. Design the automation pipeline for weekly dashboard refresh.
Lesson 3: Quarterly Board Reporting
Present the debt dashboard to the board quarterly in a 3-minute update: (1) One number — the composite health score with trend arrow, (2) One insight — the most impactful debt event this quarter, (3) One ask — budget or resource request backed by ROI. Three minutes, three points, zero technical jargon.
Health Score with quarter-over-quarter trend. Green (>70), Yellow (40-70), Red (<40).
"This quarter, we resolved the database SPOF that had a $5M revenue exposure."
"To maintain trajectory, I need $X for Q3 debt reduction. Expected ROI: Y:1."
Prepare your quarterly debt board presentation: one number, one insight, one ask. Practice delivering it in under 3 minutes.
Continue Learning: Track 9 — Technical Debt as Financial Liability
2 more lessons with actionable playbooks, executive dashboards, and engineering architecture.
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Module Syllabus
Lesson 1: Lesson 1: Dashboard Architecture
The Technical Debt Dashboard has four zones: (1) Health Score — a single 0-100 composite score reflecting overall debt health, (2) Financial Impact — debt-related costs in dollar terms (carrying cost, remediation backlog, EBITDA drag), (3) Velocity Impact — deployment frequency, lead time, and maintenance load trends, (4) Risk Register — top 5 debt-related risks with severity and probability.
Lesson 2: Lesson 2: Automated Metrics Collection
Manual debt tracking dies within 2 quarters. Automate: pull deployment frequency from CI/CD, extract maintenance load from Jira/Linear labels, calculate test coverage from CI reports, and aggregate incident data from PagerDuty/ops. The dashboard should update weekly without human intervention.
Lesson 3: Lesson 3: Quarterly Board Reporting
Present the debt dashboard to the board quarterly in a 3-minute update: (1) One number — the composite health score with trend arrow, (2) One insight — the most impactful debt event this quarter, (3) One ask — budget or resource request backed by ROI. Three minutes, three points, zero technical jargon.