Every leader knows the drag of technical debt. It’s negative gravity pulling on development speed, stability and cost. Often, there’s a quiet form of this debt that builds unnoticed because it doesn’t live in the codebase. It lives in the deployment layer.
I’ve spent the last 15 years working with commercial real estate owners and operators to modernize the digital infrastructure of their buildings. That includes everything from connectivity to automation systems. Throughout the years, I’ve seen many technology rollouts fail not because of product flaws, but because of environment and deployment mismatch.
4 Tips to Minimize Hidden Tech Debt
- Map the environment before you launch.
- Design for messy realities.
- Establish infrastructure champions.
- Build diagnostic feedback loops.
Let’s look at the kind of technical debt most teams miss and how to prevent it.
Why Good Features Break After Launch
If your project interacts with the physical world (e.g., workplace apps, smart devices, IoT platforms or facilities management tools) there’s a good chance your tech stack will rely on digital infrastructure you don’t own or control.
Unfortunately, many enterprise environments are fragmented, outdated and inconsistent. You might deploy into a building riddled with issues like a Wi-Fi network barely covering the entire floor and owned by a third party, critical systems running on legacy protocols, or multiple vendors stepping on each other’s traffic. You may even come across a building owner who doesn’t know who manages their IT closets.
When your project hits that reality, it’s a sports car on a pothole-ridden road. Latency issues, dropped data packets and weird incompatibilities crop up fast. In such a situation, you can bet that the customer doesn’t call their facilities team. Instead, they blame your team.
Then your site engineers become detectives. They spend days or weeks diagnosing what should have been a plug-and-play deployment, burning time and trust in the process.
This kind of post-launch chaos is both frustrating and expensive. Up to 40 percent of the value of tech assets is tied up in tech-debt principal, according to a McKinsey study. The majority of the surveyed CIOs also report that 10 to 20 percent of their technology budget for new products gets diverted to resolving tech debt.
And even when the product performs as expected, there are still layers to consider in the next phase, when it’s time to move data.
Why Your Data Goes Nowhere
So your purchased software product is set-up. It collects data. It triggers actions. All is well until you ask for reporting, or automation or integration with another system — and then you realize the data has nowhere to go.
In many enterprise environments, the systems a product interacts with are siloed, outdated or owned by different stakeholders. I’ve seen cases where tenant-facing apps couldn’t talk to building management systems due to incompatible protocols. In another, energy dashboards were blind to real-time HVAC data because of missing APIs. One client’s security platform couldn’t trigger alerts because the access system ran on a separate VLAN with no bridge.
These gaps may not look like system failures, but they do quietly result in lost or unusable data. In buildings with legacy systems, we've found that even something as simple as tracking occupancy or energy use can result in multiple conflicting data streams. In the book Peak Property Performance, we call this the “signal-noise spiral” — a hidden inefficiency where overlapping systems drown out actionable insight.
And its repercussions are real. In a Foundry survey of IT leaders, 58 percent said they have lost business opportunities because they couldn’t access data when they needed it. It shows that when your system can’t move data where it needs to go, it can’t create the value you expect.
How to Design With the Deployment Layer in Mind
So how do you avoid this kind of hidden tech debt?
Start by treating the deployment environment the way you treat the user journey. Make it a first-class consideration in product design and rollout planning. Here are principles we’ve developed working with enterprise environments:
1. Map the Environment Before You Launch
Don’t assume the digital infrastructure will work with your project. Map it. Ask your enterprise stakeholders or partners:
- Who owns the network your project will rely on?
- What systems or vendors does it need to talk to?
- Are there any known bottlenecks or weak links?
- Are the protocols and hardware up to date?
If you don’t get clear answers, operate on the basis of complexity and plan ahead.
About 16 billion connected IoT devices were online by the end of 2023, according to a report from Ubisense. Many of those operate at the edge of enterprise networks, where visibility is limited and compatibility varies. That means your project will probably interact with a tangled mix of hardware, protocols and ownership structures. Some of those may not have been updated in years. Make sure you know what you’re walking into.
2. Design for Messy Realities
Your project intentions might be elegant, but can you say the same about the environments it enters? Build with guardrails for latency, redundancy and partial failures. Design with the assumption that something in the stack will underperform.
One simple example: We’ve seen smart sensors deployed in buildings where metal beams or thick walls killed wireless signal strength. The fix wasn’t new software; it was swapping out access points and rerouting traffic paths. Could the project team have foreseen that? Yes, if they analyzed the layout of the physical space.
3. Establish Infrastructure Champions
Inside complex deployments, someone needs to own the environment. This might be a facilities manager, a third-party vendor or a building engineer. Don’t wait until something breaks to find this out. Identify them early and make them part of your deployment planning. Their insight can save hours of troubleshooting.
During pre-deployment conversations, ask your point of contact who controls the underlying infrastructure and who they call when systems fail. If there’s no single person, flag it as a risk.
Where possible, assign a dedicated liaison on both sides — one from your team and one from theirs — to stay aligned on dependencies, configuration needs and fallback procedures.
4. Build Diagnostic Feedback Loops
One of the best things you can do for your team is give them visibility. Can your project, once installed, report back on failed connections, blocked packets or unsupported endpoints? Can it tell the difference between an internal bug and an infrastructure problem? The faster you isolate the issue, the more trust you preserve, internally and with the client.
We often advise real estate operators to use feedback diagnostics to pinpoint whether a problem is system-wide or tied to a specific tenant deployment — and we perform these services for most clients. The same applies to operations teams: better visibility shortens the loop from detection to resolution.
Most teams think of tech debt as something inside their own house, in the repos and pipelines. In truth, a huge chunk of tech debt is inherited from the environments our projects are deployed into.
You might not own the deployment layer. But if you ignore it, it will own you.
