Design debt isn’t always broken UIs or inconsistent components. Often, it’s what you never designed in the first place. The edge cases were ignored, the onboarding flows were never mapped, and the copy said little because no one had the time to write it correctly.

At Cashfree, I noticed this firsthand. There was no Day 0 experience for newly signed-up merchants, no guidance, no next steps, no orientation for what’s next. And this isn’t a simple consumer app where a signup leads straight to action. Here, merchants need to complete KYC, understand mandates, integrate APIs, and only then become ready to transact.

It wasn’t deprioritised. It wasn’t conceptualised.

The result? A ballooning number of merchants who completed KYC and profile activation but never moved forward. A large pool of “activated but not transacted” accounts. Confused users. Care team escalations. And a growing disconnect between what the system did and what the user experienced.

Seeing What Others Don’t

I didn’t stop at observing. I signed up for myself. Clicked through the journey. Felt the same friction. And spoke with a few merchants to go deeper. Empathy is a great tool, but experience is even better. Once I walked through the flow and mapped the drop-offs, the gap was noticeable: we were verifying merchants, but we weren’t enabling them.

The system technically worked. But the experience failed. And the cost of inaction was much higher than it appeared on the surface: slower time to transaction, lost conversions, and ultimately a diluted product promise.

This is the invisible kind of design debt that never looks broken, but feels broken, especially to your users.

Compromise Is a Choice, Not an Accident.

Not all design debt is bad. Some of it is healthy, especially during early exploration, rapid experiments, and finding product-market fit. The problem starts when that debt carries forward into maturity. Or worse, when it’s created unconsciously.

That’s where strategic compromise comes in. Scrappy shipping is not a strategy. Shipping with intent means knowing precisely what you’re trading off, why it matters, and when to come back for it.

I’ve written before about this tension in To Be Pixel Perfect or Not To Be?, and how leadership is about finding the balance between quality and progress, not chasing either blindly.

As a design leader, it’s my responsibility to strike that balance. To defend the long-term experience, without slowing down momentum unnecessarily. Valuable, not just viable.

Design Debt Doesn’t Look Like Debt Until It Does

At Domino’s, I saw something similar. A subtle design issue on the cart screen was causing orders to be placed from the wrong delivery location. It wasn’t a UI flaw; the screen looked fine. But the system defaulted to the last used address, which was out of sight.

Customers unknowingly placed orders from home while sitting in the office, and then cancelled in frustration when the pizza showed up at the wrong place.

Stakeholders didn’t see a design issue until I tied it back to order rejection rates and care complaints. That’s when it clicked: invisible UX debt is real when it starts showing up in business metrics.

Good design leadership isn’t just about preventing flaws. It’s about seeing what others don’t, surfacing what’s buried, and reframing design debt as a product and business concern.

You can’t fix everything. But you can decide what to carry, when to act, and how to make those trade-offs visible.

Because the most dangerous kind of design debt is the kind no one is talking about.

👉 Where is your product silently borrowing from tomorrow’s experience?