In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk and Beyond, hosts Maxim Silaev and Nikita Golovko break down one of the most widely documented technical-debt disasters in modern enterprise IT: the failed 2018 TSB Bank migration. More than two million customers lost access to their accounts, systems malfunctioned for weeks, and leadership was forced to answer to regulators.

But behind the headlines lies a deeper lesson: technical debt exists at multiple layers: strategic, product, and architectural, and TSB’s collapse showed how these debts compound when communication fails.

Maxim and Nikita unpack:

• Strategic debt: rushed timelines, misaligned goals, and a pressured migration from Lloyds to Sabadell’s platform
• Product debt: incomplete integrations, insufficient testing, and delivery pressure that forced release of known defects
• Architectural debt: brittle interfaces, undocumented dependencies, and an infrastructure designed for a different business context
• Communication debt: silos between leadership, engineering, and vendors, amplifying risk until it became unavoidable

Drawing from their own experience assessing technical debt for organizations, the hosts explain how to recognize early warning signs, measure debt at every level, and communicate risks effectively to leadership.

TSB is more than a failure story, it is a blueprint for understanding how technical debt grows, how it hides, and how it can paralyze an entire company when left unmanaged.

Next episode: How to quickly evaluate the technical debt volume in your organization.

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxim-silaev
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-nikita-golovko

What happens when a company’s biggest vulnerability isn’t its software, but its communication?

In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk and Beyond, hosts Maxim Silaev and Nikita Golovko explore the collapse of Interserve, a UK-based outsourcing and construction giant that suffered a major data breach in 2020, exposing the personal data of over 100,000 employees and resulting in a £4.4 million fine from the Information Commissioner’s Office.

The breach was more than a phishing email gone wrong. It was the inevitable outcome of years of architectural neglect, fragmented systems, poor training, and missing communication between business and technology. Maxim breaks down the technical side: outdated software, legacy infrastructure, weak identity management, and a dangerous overreliance on trust assumptions: classic security debt. Nikita then connects the dots to organizational behavior: silos, misaligned incentives, and a culture where IT was reactive instead of strategic.

Together they uncover:

• The forms of technical and organizational debt that led to Interserve’s downfall;
• How communication debt amplifies security risk;
• The hidden “single points of failure” in both systems and decision-making;
• How AI and automation could have helped detect risks earlier;
• Why architecture and culture must evolve together.

Interserve’s story is a case study in how security failures are often symptoms, not causes, the result of decades of accumulated technical and human debt.

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxim-silaev
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-nikita-golovko

Secure Boot was designed to solve one of the most fundamental security problems in computing: how to ensure that only trusted software starts your machine. But like any architectural decision, it came with its own trade-offs, and its own technical debt.

In this episode of Technical Debt: Design, Risk and Beyond, Maxim Silaev and Nikita Golovko explore Secure Boot as a case study in how solving one kind of debt often creates another. Maxim explains how the pre-Secure Boot world fragmented BIOS loaders, vendor-specific boot hacks, and no shared trust model, which was itself a form of technical debt waiting to explode. Nikita then breaks down how Secure Boot centralized trust and improved integrity, while introducing new risks: reliance on external signing authorities, firmware lock-ins, and single points of failure.

Together, they unpack:

• How Secure Boot actually works, and why the world before it was pure architectural chaos
• Why "centralized trust" solved one problem but created another
• How dependency on Microsoft’s signing keys became an industry-scale risk
• What communication failures between OEMs, OS vendors, and users taught us about architectural assumptions
• How AI might help us audit and secure firmware chains in the future

Whether you’re in firmware, architecture, or security, this episode shows how even the most well-intentioned design can accumulate invisible debt, and why architecture is as much about people and trust as it is about code.

Next episode: How to design architecture specifically to minimize technical debt from the start.

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Reach us @ LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxim-silaev
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-nikita-golovko