All MVPs carry debt. Good teams choose which debt is strategic and which debt becomes a production incident.
Acceptable debt
- Duplicated UI components.
- Manual admin scripts instead of full admin UI.
- Hard-coded email templates.
- Missing test coverage on experimental features.
Unacceptable debt
- No migrations for schema changes.
- Secrets in the repo.
- Auth checks only in the frontend.
- Ambiguous ownership of money-moving code.
Paydown trigger
When a second engineer joins or monthly revenue crosses your comfort threshold, schedule a hardening sprint: tests on billing and auth, monitoring, and delete dead code paths.
Use this as a working checklist inside your team first. When the same steps repeat every week and spreadsheets start breaking, that is usually the moment to scope one workflow, one user group, one measurable outcome and a fixed handover plan as an owned system. See the relevant Standen service · More guides · SaaS ops audit.