A negotiating technique for building a business case for fixing a technical-debt or quality problem without formal P&L ownership: quantify the problem in dollar terms — engineering time burned, call-center cost driven by the bug, churn attributable to it — even when nobody has assigned you a budget line to defend. Barham frames the payoff as reputational as much as tactical: showing up with a dollar figure is what shifts how a PM or engineering leader is perceived in a prioritization fight, from someone "being a stick in the mud" about quality to being seen as "a steward of the business." Commonly used alongside "Don't Scale Expensive Problems" (Architectural Debt Mistake) when technical debt needs to compete against feature work for the same budget.