Perhaps technical debt is the wrong term to use with nontechnical people, who tend to startle that they aren't even meant to understand so soon as the "tech" pa

Perhaps technical debt is the wrong term to use with nontechnical people, who tend to startle that they aren't even meant to understand so soon as the "tech" part comes out of someone's mouth. If they understand financial debt on a balance sheet and they understand schedules and Gantt charts, perhaps we should call technical debt what it really is to the business: temporal debt. Explain that because we've taken shortcuts in the past, we were literally borrowing time from the future, and that time balloons with interest until we pay it back.