I'm dealing with this at work in an odd way. The users of the product are machines, as it is a predictive inference system. Humans will never directly interact with the product. So if you think about it, the input data is the user in my group's case.
Due to the failure in recognizing this twist the decision was made to have a very restricted way of representing features (metadata). The concepts in code base are all linked by the restrictions. There have been a few painful refactorings in the past year, and I don't see an end to it unless those restrictions are removed. So this phrase extends well to systems without human users.
Although like others I do agree that "bad product design" is probably a better term, but "conceptual debt" sounds more sophisticated.
Due to the failure in recognizing this twist the decision was made to have a very restricted way of representing features (metadata). The concepts in code base are all linked by the restrictions. There have been a few painful refactorings in the past year, and I don't see an end to it unless those restrictions are removed. So this phrase extends well to systems without human users.
Although like others I do agree that "bad product design" is probably a better term, but "conceptual debt" sounds more sophisticated.