Does your system tracking and respect countervailing factors adequately?
How would you know you were making "too much" profit? (i.e. that expenses and dangers are being overlooked or papered over.)
Would "technical debt" work better as a metaphor if developers explained to business that too much of it made the company vulnerable to the technical equivalent of a hostile takeover?
For example: "If we don't upgrade from MySQL 5.7 soon, we'll get 'owned' by someone who moves faster in the database innovation space."
Imagine trying to make an automobile factory match the unit/day productivity rate of a shoe factory by replacing all the auto-part machines with shoe-part machines. It would turn into an absolute mess.
That's what happens when the specific rituals/processes of one team are forced onto another, very different team without a thought as to how well they would fit.
Procedurally generated planets: https://casual-effects.com/research/McGuire2019ProcGen/McGuire2019ProcGen.pdf.
A sufficiently disorganized team can overcome even the most powerful of collaboration tools or collaboration-friendly frameworks.
Developer at ThoughtWorks.
Into Ruby, JavaScript, Rust, and many other languages.