Where I work we use the term technical debt to differentiate between work that has been requested for business reasons (by the CTO, VP of engineering or product

Where I work we use the term technical debt to differentiate between work that has been requested for business reasons (by the CTO, VP of engineering or product managers), and improvements that developers think can help us work faster with fewer bugs (tech. debt). Given that there is a continuous change of priorities, knowledge and staff with different skill levels, it's just a fact of life that we accumulate some crappy design and lack of documentation. I think it's useful to have a label for this because it needs a different process for judging it's merit than customer or performance-oriented changes.