Human Tech Debt
Human tech debt. It’s what grows when organizations recognize technical effort as work while treating the effort required to keep people working together as overhead.
Most organizations continue functioning while carrying large amounts of it. Projects still launch. Teams still meet deadlines. Leadership still sees progress.
As a PM, I saw it as my responsibility to absorb as much organizational friction as possible so the team could stay focused on their work. The effort required to keep people aligned, coordinated, and functional was treated as overhead. In fact, my livelihood, career, and identity was built around this belief.
Technical organizations have operated this way for decades. Teams have always relied on people invisibly translating between functions, carrying institutional memory, smoothing over ambiguity, and compensating for coordination gaps that never fully disappear in complex systems. None of this was usually treated as core operational work. It was simply part of how work got done. The debt remained mostly invisible because the systems continued moving forward.
It looked like:
Maintaining side channels to keep work moving outside of the formal system
Translating between groups so disagreements don’t escalate
Taking on work so others can take PTO
Passing along context, relationships, and institutional memory “in case you get hit by a bus”
Over the past several years, technical organizations have been operating inside two accelerating dynamics at once. The first has been organizational instability: restructurings, leadership churn, layoffs, rapid hiring cycles, shifting operating models, and the gradual erosion of institutional continuity that followed the pandemic years. The second has been technical acceleration through generative AI and related systems.
For a while, these dynamics operated on mostly parallel tracks. Human coordination continued to absorb instability while technical systems increased speed, output, and complexity underneath it. But those tracks are beginning to converge. Organizations are no longer just accelerating technical work.
They are beginning to restructure themselves around the assumption that no human coordination will be required at all.
