What Is Design Debt Really Costing Your Team?
August 21, 2025
In the growing world of digital products, everyone talks or knows about “Technical debt”, these shortcuts in code that eventually demand payment with interest. But there’s a lesser-known cousin that often silently accumulates, leading to significant future costs: “Design debt”. If your product feels like a patchwork quilt with inconsistent UI, poor information architecture, unclear copy, and fractured UX, it’s likely plagued with design debt.
Source: What Is Design Debt Really Costing Your Team? | by Mohammed Zabeeh Ur Rahman
We’ve covered tech debt quite a bit at Conffab and at our conferences, and recently we linked to an article on leadership debt. But what about design debt? Mohammed Zabeeh Ur considers this more.
