Why Risk Registers Matter

It’s easy to maintain a technical debt backlog, refactor this, rewrite that. But for non-technical stakeholders, it’s often unclear what repaying that debt actually means in terms of effort or, more importantly, impact.

A risk register helps frame shortcomings in your systems in a way that clearly outlines the work required to address them, and the risk of not doing so.

By having a risk register, you have a shared space with all collaborators, including senior leadership, where people are aligned on what is not working, what we're accepting as problems and what the status is on solving them moving forward.

While it may seem similar to a product roadmap, a risk register serves a different purpose. A risk register's main purpose is to identify areas where we are either accepting or rejecting the risks that our platforms and systems present to day to day business.

A Practical Example

Let's take a concrete example, imagine you have a system in production that relies on a third party for historical employment information about your customer. This third party doesn't have a reliable sandbox or testing environment.

When testing changes you simply mock out an example stub of the third party response and assume everything works their end.

The risk here is you're unable to test specific responses from this third party. For instance, your stub might always return "Acme Inc" as a full employment history, but you may need to test scenarios where there are employment gaps. Your current setup can’t support that.

It's easy to come to the conclusion here "oh we just need a ticket to stub out different responses depending on context". But thinking deeper, what the deeper issue here is, is that you can not extensively test this integration which may lead to issues in how we're parsing employment history, or to put more bluntly, User Acceptance Testing has restrictions for happy & unhappy paths alike.

By framing it this way, both technical and non-technical stakeholders can understand the platform's limitations and make an informed decision on whether they’re comfortable deprioritising a fix.

Equally having risks like this built out in a more generic way allows for the opportunity to think more broadly about the problem too. In this example, is there issues like this with other third parties? Do we need a broader solution?

A risk register doesn’t just highlight technical shortcomings, it aligns all stakeholders on which risks you're consciously accepting in your platform.

Bonus: Template

Here is a template I've used in the past with great success for risk management.

Note that the category comes from the CAPS framework I have previous written about and the severity is broadly down to you to define what a P0, P1 & P2 actually are

A good risk register turns “we should probably fix this someday” into “we’ve made a conscious decision about what to tackle, and when.” It’s a powerful tool for building transparency, alignment, and trust between engineering and the business.