Managing Innovation and Maintenance Development

· 1 min read

In response to"An Elegant Puzzle" by Will Larsonamazon.com

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.

A highlighted book passage arguing that innovation and maintenance should be kept together rather than split across separate teams, to avoid a two-tiered class system of innovators and maintainers.

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.

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Written by Mashhood Rastgar, who helps engineering organisations become agent-native. If this is your situation, tell me where your team sits. Also on the newsletter.

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