Managing Innovation and Maintenance Development

Both are important, but having the right balance is important is the teams involved.

When managing #engineering teams - one challenge is often to balance the work between new features (innovation) and fixing bugs or adjusting older features (maintenance). This excerpt from "An Elegant Puzzle" by Will Larson is spot on about managing both aspecting from the same team rather than splitting the work between two teams.

This helps the team cycle through old and new stuff at the same time, so they have good knowledge about the old systems, and are happy to learn new things when creating the next generation stuff.

One additional tricky aspect of this is issues rolling in which need to be tackled during a sprint or feature development. Having a dedicated "hot-fix" crew (within your team) helps the team focus on their work and not get distracted by the new issues.