Taste debt
The design version of tech debt. It compounds silently and everyone blames the last VP.
What it is
Taste debt is the gap between what your product could look like and what it does look like. Like tech debt, it compounds silently. Unlike tech debt, nobody writes a Jira ticket for it.
How to pay it down
Small, regular refactors of the stuff that makes you wince. Not a redesign — a redesign is how taste debt becomes a crisis. A ten-minute cleanup every week beats a ten-week rebrand every three years.