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In the world of B2B commerce, speed is often the first priority. Companies race to deliver features on time, respond to customer demands, or plug in new systems to close a deal. To hit those goals, teams turn to ‘temporary’ solutions - shortcuts that skip over clean architecture or coding best practices.
Those shortcuts deliver quick wins. They make it possible to launch a feature, connect a third-party tool, or meet a customer deadline, but they rarely stay temporary. Instead, they build up into something far more difficult to manage: technical debt.
Technical debt works like a loan. You get a boost of speed today by cutting corners, but you pay interest tomorrow. That interest comes in the form of slower development cycles, easily cracked systems, and rework that eats into engineering time.
In a B2B context, where platforms must support complex pricing models, custom workflows, and deep integrations, this debt compounds quickly.
Unlike a late project or a missed feature, technical debt doesn’t set off alarms right away. It stays hidden. The problems surface later - when growth starts to slow, when innovation becomes harder, and when the system begins buckling under its own weight.
Delivering quickly is tempting, and often necessary, but the hidden cost is that growth gets harder with every shortcut.
When debt builds up, every new feature takes longer to ship. Developers spend time tiptoeing around fragile code, writing workarounds for edge cases, and dealing with tangled dependencies. What used to be a one-week project can stretch into a month, and even small changes require extensive testing and QA to make sure nothing else breaks.
This isn’t just a technical headache, but a serious strategic problem. A McKinsey study found that companies with high technical debt spend up to 40% of their technology capacity just managing complexity instead of building new capabilities.
The slowdown affects every team: product managers cancel roadmap items because delivery is too slow, sales wait longer for the features customers request, and support deals with more issues tied to workflows that don’t behave consistently. Slowly but surely, a company that once looked like a high-growth story begins to stall.
The interest on debt isn’t only slower code. It shows up as lost opportunities, missed deals, and slower momentum across the entire business.
B2B platforms face debt more quickly than most because of their complexity.
Technical debt isn’t usually the result of poor engineering. It’s the outcome of moving fast in a complex environment without the time to design for the long term.
Here’s a scenario that plays out often. Imagine a mid-sized company builds its commerce system quickly to support fast growth. They set up storefronts, connect accounting tools, and customize order workflows to close deals. At the beginning, it all works, and the system seems flexible enough to handle what’s next.
As the business expands, things get harder: more products come online, new pricing rules are introduced, tax logic and regional configurations pile up. To keep pace, teams add features as fast as possible - they hardcode rules or create quick workarounds just to keep things running. Slowly, the platform shifts from adaptable to fragile. Updates become painful, scaling feels impossible, and even small changes risk breaking something important.
This story isn’t unusual. According to statistics gathered by OroCommerce, nearly 70% of B2B leaders believe their platforms no longer meet their business needs, and 68% say they’re frustrated by how long it takes to implement changes.
Those numbers don’t reflect bad tools. They reflect growing technical debt that hasn’t been managed.
Debt itself isn’t bad. Like financial debt, it can be useful if you manage it wisely. The trouble starts when teams ignore it or treat it as someone else’s problem. That’s when it quietly builds into a major barrier to growth.
The best companies face it directly. They make debt visible, measurable, and part of their regular planning. McKinsey recommends creating a ‘technical debt balance sheet’ - a record of known issues that slow development or increase risk. This might include outdated libraries, coupled modules, missing tests, or undocumented logic.
Once the debt is mapped out, it can be budgeted for. According to vFunction, top-performing teams dedicate 10–20% of their engineering time to reducing technical debt. That may sound high, but it pays off in faster delivery, stronger quality, and fewer last-minute emergencies.
The key is to make debt management routine, not a special project. Teams that succeed often:
By treating debt as a normal part of development, teams stop firefighting and start building for the long term. Debt becomes manageable, not a looming threat.
Leading teams don’t just manage debt - they build processes and culture to stay ahead of it.
On the tools side:
On the culture side:
Debt often grows from pressure, not laziness. By shifting culture to value sustainability and speed equally, companies create systems that grow stronger instead of weaker as they expand.
Technical debt is unavoidable. Every business carries some, just as every operation has inefficiencies. The real difference is whether it’s managed.
B2B commerce platforms don’t fail because of shortcuts. They fail when shortcuts pile up and never get revisited. When code becomes a bottleneck, growth slows - not because the market isn’t there, but because the platform can’t keep up.
The upside is that debt can be controlled. With the right tools, consistent processes, and the right mindset, companies can regain speed, confidence, and agility.
The platforms that scale the best aren’t the ones that launched fastest. They’re the ones that cleaned up as they went, treated technology as a long-term asset, and refused to let debt dictate their future.
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