The long lifetime and the evolving nature of industrial products make them subject to quality improvement at different levels such as architecture and code. Where one might be tempted to start the quality improvement by adopting state-of-the-art software architecture techniques, our experience shows that we can only achieve the desired outcome if we take the bigger picture into account; i.e. (technical) debt management. Based on the literature, technical debt repayment should start by the identification of technical debt. However, in a study that we have been performing in a large-scale industrial company as our client, we realized that finding the right starting point to effectively identify and repay technical debt is in fact a major challenge. This paper elaborates on various causes that we have identified for this challenge, and discusses our stepwise approach to address them so that the software quality can be improved. We believe that our experiences can be beneficial for both practitioners and researchers to gain more insight into applying quality improvement in practice as well as indicating open areas for further research.