The hidden cost of technical debt: How marketers can break free of systemic drag

What is technical debt? As a marketer, you don’t need a technical definition to measure technical debt — you feel the drag. The system that once supported you is slowing you down. Simple changes feel heavy. Progress stalls. Teams drift apart. Developers blame marketers for going rogue; marketers blame developers for building something no one can use.

But no one’s really wrong — they’re caught in the gravity of a system that’s drifted off course. A few cut corners, a quick fix here and there, rushed launches that didn’t quite follow the prescribed process have left a pile of technical debt. Now the system is unstable, and everything wobbles.

This article is about recognizing when the system is slowing momentum and dragging your team off course, diagnosing the misalignments, and showing you how to restore balance and chart a new course.

What is technical debt, and is it always a bad thing?

Technical debt is any part of the code base that’s inefficient or not scaled appropriately to the size of the system or its purpose. It makes things harder than they should be. For marketers, that might mean using clunky tools, dealing with inconsistent layouts, or relying on developers for basic content updates.

Not all technical debt is bad. Just like financial debt, it can be productive. A student loan can unlock future earnings. A mortgage can make a home attainable without decades of saving. In the same way, technical debt, when taken on intentionally, can help you seize a fleeting opportunity or validate a risky idea quickly.

Technical debt becomes a problem when we keep bypassing the system and cutting corners. The workarounds and inefficiencies pile up, and the whole system feels slow and broken.

The more marketers understand the tradeoffs that lead to technical debt and the importance of “paying it back,” the better equipped they are to work with developers to reduce technical debt.

Five signs that technical debt is slowing you down

Some people get hung up on how to measure technical debt. While quantifying debt can be useful, it’s more important to recognize the signs that your system is slowing you down. 

Here are some common signs of technical debt to look for:

1. Training new people is difficult

Too many rules or workarounds make it difficult to onboard new people. One company I worked with stopped training new marketers because it was too difficult to explain the system. They would hire a third party to do the work from scratch for big releases, making it even harder to create standard processes and workflows.

2. You’re not reusing content and components

An efficient system is built with reuse in mind. You lose that efficiency when you start bolting on pieces that aren’t integrated, like a separate CMS for mobile apps. Marketers waste time copying and pasting or duplicating content, which inevitably leads to errors.

3. Inefficient workflows slow everything down

When every campaign or new experience is a one-off, you lose the opportunity to build momentum through repeatable workflows. Instead of getting faster, everything feels slow and difficult. It’s impossible to scale efficiently or add AI tools into workflows that are convoluted and inconsistent. 

When technical debt builds up, even simple tasks like updating a product description become unnecessarily complicated.

4. Teams are isolated or overly dependent

Because technical debt is seen as a developer problem, it creates friction between teams. Marketers rely on developers to make changes but don’t collaborate with them to create long-term solutions. You can end up overly dependent on a handful of people who understand the system. 

5. The cost of change is too high

You know the system is broken, but a redesign or replatform is so complex it's a non-starter. It takes months to add new functionality like modern personalization tools, AI, or a better editing experience for marketers. Inability to change puts you farther and farther behind the competition.

See how the cloud-based point-of-sale platform Clover overcame these challenges with a platform both marketers and engineers love.

It takes marketers and developers to successfully reduce technical debt 

When I work with companies to implement Contentful, I encourage them to include developers and marketers from the start. This can mean spending a few months educating marketers on the value of a design system, facilitating collaboration between developers and marketers, and getting comfortable with refining content models and design components instead of working around them.

Here are a few things I’ve learned:

Start with shared understanding

Marketing and development teams need to find common ground. Getting that empathy first is paramount. Once teams understand each other, they can make informed decisions about tradeoffs and how decisions will impact their work. 

Build a single source of truth

Silos lead to chaos. The Contentful platform centralizes content, uses a design system, and integrates with a large ecosystem of other tools. Seamless integrations and automated workflows increase speed and consistency.

Make modularity the foundation

When people have to work outside their expertise, things slow down. Managing hard-coded copy slows developers down. Waiting on developers to update a template slows marketers down. Modularity fixes this with reusable components, structured content, and clear roles that let everyone build experiences faster.

Make the best, the easiest choice

The usability of the system will determine whether it succeeds or fails. If you want someone to do something a certain way, make that the easiest choice. If your system is hard to use or requires extensive documentation to explain, people will find shortcuts. 

Give marketing more autonomy

Empower non-developers to make changes without breaking things. Role-specific governance and workflows provide guardrails so marketers can be creative and experiment without the fear of breaking something or going too far off brand.

Have someone own the project

Resistance to change and the temptation to recreate old processes on a new system are natural. Having a champion who can oversee the system, woo laggards into compliance, and help everyone understand how maintaining the system helps them will boost acceptance and keep the system closer to the middle of the spectrum. 

Making the case for reducing technical debt

Technical debt doesn’t go away on its own. The longer you let it build, the harder everything becomes. 

Marketers can drive change by recognizing the signs of technical debt and helping stakeholders see that there is a solution. One of the most effective ways to make the case is through a single, tangible example — something small that clearly illustrates a larger, repeatable problem. 

In this example, duplicating versions of the same content creates more work and results in inconsistencies.

Show how a single component, built without shared tokens or clear design rules, has been recreated a dozen different ways. Now multiply that across the site. How many hours are spent fixing inconsistencies? How many brand mismatches make it to production? How many teams are reinventing the same thing in isolation?

Take a single product and compare how it’s described by marketing, the call center, and the product team. If the language is inconsistent, the experience will be too. Now multiply that by every product, every audience segment, every region.

When you show one clear failure and then scale it conceptually, people immediately grasp the hidden size of the problem. It doesn’t feel theoretical anymore. It feels expensive.

The solution: Reduce technical debt with systems that fit

Once you’ve established that technical debt is a problem worth fixing, it’s time to look for flexible solutions that can meet your business where you are now and evolve with you (hopefully debt-free).

The Contentful Platform is built to help teams scale their systems and work together more efficiently. Whether you’re dealing with content sprawl, design inconsistency, or developer bottlenecks, Contentful gives each team a clear place to contribute, without stepping on someone else’s toes.

Content creators are empowered to create. Designers can work within systems that scale. Developers can build flexible foundations without owning every update. And because we’ve helped so many organizations tackle these same challenges, we know how to support the talent, communication, and structure needed to make the system truly work.

More importantly, we help you move at your pace. Whether you’re untangling a legacy platform, rolling out a design system, or introducing new workflows, Contentful flexes to fit your goals — and grows with you.

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