For several years, I’ve been advocating for engineering teams to stop obsessing over tech debt and start looking for ways to increase tech capital. Those who have done so saw the dramatic impact it had on organizations. And lately, we’ve finally seen what this approach can really provide. Are you sitting on your hands?

What It Means

Whereas tech debt can only reduce a fixed number of issues and thus is limited in what benefit it can bring, tech capital is about software solutions that accelerate different parts of the business, not necessarily within the tech organization. We’re not talking about features, but about capabilities that make the team itself faster.

You might not consider it that, but as an example, think about paying for a good CRM for the Sales team—that’s tech capital, but the type you purchase. Internally, we often have tech capital in the form of engineering velocity efforts. We create tooling and systems that make our work as engineers more efficient (like a reliable CI/CD system, which means we can ship code faster and with less stress). That’s tech capital, even if it’s the type you take for granted.

Taking it a level further, teams that doubled down on tech capital have amassed tooling and solutions that aid everyone in the team. It’s about automations to tackle common problems and reduce the load from customer success, wizards and sandboxes to onboard users to your platform without having to do handholding, tools for better marketing experiments, etc.

What’s Changing

Many are now realizing the potential of tech capital without being aware of it. How many PMs, marketers, and salespeople have posted what they created for themselves with a vibe coding tool or got OpenClaw to do for them? That’s tech capital, friends. It’s only that now it means you don’t have to wait for the engineers to make some time for them.

This change has also made many people realize what code can mean to them without needing to be too code-literate. Whereas in the past, many couldn’t even imagine what was possible and were oblivious to the many imperfections in their day-to-day work, now eyes have opened. When your mom looks at a tedious thing she’s been doing mindlessly for years and finally wonders if the “computers” can’t take care of it, you know we’ve turned a corner.

Join It

What does this mean for you and your team? As with everything AI-related, you shouldn’t try to find the one-true-solution yet. Things are just changing too fast. Instead, aim to be an active participant in this wherever possible.

For example, if others in the company are already vibe coding internal tools, double down on it. Share the successes, teach them about the needed guardrails, and actually turn this into an internal backlog. Things are vibecoded, and if they demonstrate enough value, they might be handed off officially to engineering to redo it properly and take ownership of it. This means that many experiments will only take up engineering time once they’re almost guaranteed to pay off.

Second, ensure that your team realizes the concept of tech capital and starts noticing it in the wild. This is one of those areas where merely teaching about it can have a noticeable effect. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Don’t leave tech capital on the table.