[cestith]

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.

[wobbly_bush]

> perhaps we should call technical debt what it really is to the business: temporal debt

If they startle at the mention of "tech", how are they not going to be startled with "temporal"?

[cestith]

Then just say "time". Honestly, if your director, CIO, and CEO don't have a decent vocabulary then perhaps explaining this issue isn't your firm's biggest problem.