The Label Is the Lie
“Low priority” sounds like a risk assessment. It isn’t. Most of the time, it’s a postponement dressed up as a decision. The issue gets that label not because someone evaluated its potential impact but because fixing it right now is inconvenient.
There’s a critical difference between low urgency and low risk. Engineering teams conflate them constantly. An issue can be completely non-urgent today and catastrophic six months from now. The label doesn’t capture that. It just kicks the can.
And the can keeps rolling.
What the Numbers Actually Say
This isn’t a theoretical problem.
In September 2025, a CAST report analysed over 10 billion lines of code and found that companies globally would need 61 billion workdays of developer time to pay off the technical debt they’ve accumulated. Even if every developer in the world worked on nothing else, it would take nine years to clear it.
Deloitte’s 2026 Global Technology Leadership Study found that technical debt already accounts for 21% to 40% of an organisation’s entire IT spending. Not a side cost. A structural one.
And developers aren’t immune to the consequences. Research shows that unresolved tech debt reduces development speed by 30% and lowers team morale for over half of all software engineers. The backlog you’re not clearing is actively slowing down the work you are doing.
The Real World Consequences
The pattern is consistent across industries, and the examples are not subtle.
Southwest Airlines had engineers warning about mounting technical debt for years. Leadership kept it low priority. Then in December 2022, during peak holiday travel, the system collapsed — 17,000 flights cancelled, $825 million in losses, and a public trust crisis that took years to recover from. The debt didn’t accumulate overnight. It accumulated sprint by sprint, quarter by quarter, in exactly the same way most teams accumulate it today.
In November 2025, a latent bug one that had been sitting dormant was triggered by a routine configuration change. The result: Spotify, X, and ChatGPT all went down simultaneously. Nobody had flagged that bug as urgent. It had never caused a problem before.
That’s the nature of latent issues. They don’t cause problems until the moment they do. And that moment is always poorly timed.
Why Teams Keep Making This Call
Understanding the pattern doesn’t make it easy to break. There are real structural reasons this keeps happening.
Velocity pressure. Every sprint has deliverables. Product wants features. Stakeholders want progress they can see. Fixing a background issue that isn’t causing visible problems doesn’t make the demo. So it gets pushed. Diffused ownership. Low priority tickets often belong to no one specifically. There’s no deadline, no stakeholder asking about it, no escalation path. Without ownership, nothing moves.
The invisible cost problem. The cost of not fixing something is nearly impossible to quantify until it breaks. The cost of fixing it is immediate and concrete. That asymmetry consistently skews decisions toward deferral. Normalisation of risk. Once a ticket has survived three sprints without causing an incident, it psychologically starts to feel safe. Teams begin to assume that if it were really a problem, something would have happened by now. This is the most dangerous logic in engineering.
The Compounding Effect Nobody Talks About
Here’s what makes low priority issues genuinely insidious: they don’t just sit there. They compound.
Systems built on top of unresolved issues become harder to modify. New features inherit old assumptions. Code written around a known issue creates dependencies on the workaround. Over time, what was a two-hour fix becomes a two-week refactor, because the rest of the codebase has quietly grown around the problem.
McKinsey estimates tech debt can represent up to 40% of a company’s total technology estate value. That’s not the cost of the original ignored ticket. That’s the accumulated cost of the system that got built on top of it.
What Actually Fixes This
The answer isn’t “fix everything immediately.” That’s not realistic and it’s not the point. The point is to stop using the word “priority” as a substitute for “risk.” Every low priority item should have one additional field answered before it gets that label: what does this look like in six months if it’s still unresolved?
Teams that manage technical debt well share a few consistent practices. They dedicate a fixed percentage of every sprint typically 15–20% specifically to debt and non-urgent issues. They assign ownership to every ticket, even the quiet ones. And they make the cost of inaction visible by framing it in business terms: engineering hours lost to workarounds, velocity reduction, risk surface.
The backlog is not a waiting room. It’s a risk register.
