> " Most often, product owners and developers were not able to establish good communication, which led to developers basically creating a product that didn't match what customers wanted. Period."

Thanks a bunch for pointing this out! It's important for me to hear this here :).

Regarding my definition of technical debt is this:

* Lack for proper documentation where on boarding devs is becoming a burden.

* Lack of written tests to a point writing new features is almost inevitable from breaking the product.

* Delayed refactoring which has led to serious performance issues.

* Lack of alignment to standards where the engineers have written everything in Javascript like a 5 years old painting all the wall with same color, rather than using a different language for some specific purposes.

Some other Technical Debts that I meant were:

* How engineers go on a trajectory of writing code where no one knows something new have been added.

* Lack of clarity who have done what, regardless Code commits, this one is about knowing who lead a milestone or a feature to production.