The first step to solving technical debt has to be for the business and technical teams to have a common, agreed direction for the product(s). To determine the right direction, the team will need a ‘map’ – this is generally the company vision, which should come from the senior management team/board. Only with a clear direction to measure their progress against, can they be sure that they’re all aligned and how far along the path . . .
Sometimes you will come across a codebase/application that looks in such a mess or so old that the only option is to do a full rewrite. The code is horrible and out of date, it’s using an old version of a language/framework and everyone has forgotten how it works. Everyone agrees it will be much faster to just throw it away and start again. This seems to be how so many software projects start. Over . . .