Technical Debt: Design, risk and beyond
We talk to experienced architects and technology leaders about the architectural choices they’ve made — the good, the bad, and the costly. From scaling systems to integrating legacy platforms, from misaligned domains to governance gaps, we discuss how architecture impacts technical debt.
You’ll hear honest stories of architectural missteps, what teams learned from them, and how they built systems designed not just to work, but to last.
Technical Debt: Design, risk and beyond
How to assess technical debt: strategic, product, and architectural: TSB Bank case study
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In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk and Beyond, hosts Maxim Silaev and Nikita Golovko break down one of the most widely documented technical-debt disasters in modern enterprise IT: the failed 2018 TSB Bank migration. More than two million customers lost access to their accounts, systems malfunctioned for weeks, and leadership was forced to answer to regulators.
But behind the headlines lies a deeper lesson: technical debt exists at multiple layers: strategic, product, and architectural, and TSB’s collapse showed how these debts compound when communication fails.
Maxim and Nikita unpack:
- Strategic debt: rushed timelines, misaligned goals, and a pressured migration from Lloyds to Sabadell’s platform
- Product debt: incomplete integrations, insufficient testing, and delivery pressure that forced release of known defects
- Architectural debt: brittle interfaces, undocumented dependencies, and an infrastructure designed for a different business context
- Communication debt: silos between leadership, engineering, and vendors, amplifying risk until it became unavoidable
Drawing from their own experience assessing technical debt for organizations, the hosts explain how to recognize early warning signs, measure debt at every level, and communicate risks effectively to leadership.
TSB is more than a failure story, it is a blueprint for understanding how technical debt grows, how it hides, and how it can paralyze an entire company when left unmanaged.
Next episode: How to quickly evaluate the technical debt volume in your organization.
Reach us @ LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxim-silaev
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-nikita-golovko
