Tech Health, Not Tech Debt: Keeping Systems Fit at Scale (with Troy Mcilvena)

“Tech debt” sounds scary – but what if you reframed it as tech health and made it everyone’s job to keep systems fit, fast and supportable? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Will, Nick and special guest Troy Mcilvena, Head of Architecture (Online) at SEEK, unpack how SEEK moved from hand-wavy tech debt complaints to a clear, business-aligned tech health model that works from startups through to large enterprises. This episode's special guest: Troy Mcilvena (SEEK Head of Architecture - Online) In this episode, we explore: • Why SEEK talks about tech health instead of tech debt – how binary, subjective “debt” language fails with executives, and how framing work in terms of security, performance, recovery, efficiency, availability and deployability (SPREAD) gets you real buy-in and a bigger slice of your OKRs. • How SEEK measures and governs tech health at scale – from monthly “wall walks” with CTO/CPO reviewing SPREAD alongside product metrics, to Tech Health’s five pillars (security, fitness for purpose, technical fit, speed & agility, supportability), to criticality and tolerance models that say “this must never go down, this can tolerate a day on paper forms.” • Practical advice to start your own tech health model – why you should begin with a painful business problem (not a shiny internet framework), anchor everything in revenue, trust and conversion, use SLO experiments (even injecting errors/latency) to find “good enough”, and design ownership, system boundaries and catalogues that make it clear who owns what and when to rewrite vs retire. If you’re a software engineer, architect, SRE, platform lead or IT manager wondering how to justify “non-feature” work, balance OKRs between “run the business” and “shift the business”, and stop surprise rewrites or outages, this episode is packed with language and tools you can take straight back to your teams. 🔔 Follow the SEEK Bytes podcast so you never miss a new episode