Balancing innovation and reliability is like walking a tightrope. You have to push the boundaries of technology, but you also need to keep things stable. Build a Strong Foundation: Invest in a robust architecture and have backup plans. Take Small Steps: Introduce new features gradually and test them thoroughly. Teamwork: Encourage collaboration and open communication among teams. Leverage Technology: Use automation, cloud, and AI to streamline processes and improve efficiency. Learn and Adapt: Continuously learn from mistakes and stay updated on the latest trends. Remember, it's a delicate balance.

Creative & limitless thinking bring new concepts and Innovative ideas to address customer needs. Concept to product is a different challenge. As the concept passes through different stages of productization, trade offs are essential not just to ensure reliability and stability, but other aspects like manufacturability, serviceability...etc. Balance is key to delight the customer.

True innovation requires experimenting with ideas that may not work immediately and embracing mistakes. It demands investment and time, and you need to accept that knowing that innovation can also make you unique and deliver value beyond your customers' expectations. You need to find a balance between time to market (and keeping your company alive) and innovation, possibly by having different teams focus on each area and coordinate their efforts. This allows you to pursue innovation without hindering product development.

In my experience, it costs little to send one or two interested people off to come up to speed on a new technology/approach/framework, read about it, spin up a toy project and then write up their results or at least make the project available for others to look at and take in. If it delivers results for the business or looks promising, maybe consider scaling up or putting together a plan to actually implement it on a larger scale. This, A. Keeps the team aware of new, potentially useful things, B. doesn't affect currently running & productive systems, C. Provides a way to respond "Yes, we know, we've been looking at it " to the manager/exec who just got back from a conference and is breathlessly enthusing about $THING.

Considero que para mejorar los aspectos de innovación y fiabilidad de un producto o servicio es necesario incluirlos en los procesos de calidad, con el foco puesto en la innovación, se van realizando iteraciones que permitan progresar sin descuidar la fiabilidad y calidad, paso a paso pero con constancia se van tratando las ramificaciones que sean necesarias para mejorar lo existente y probablemente consiguiendo productos nuevos.

The innovations I value the most are the ones that make our system more reliable and robust whether by leveraging new technology or brilliant refactor. For me the best innovators are not the ones that think about new feature, that’s easy, but those who innovate how to make our current solution better. So I don’t see a need to balance, on the contrary, I encourage people to constantly innovate and think how we can make our system and operation more reliable.

A chave está em adotar uma abordagem progressiva e calculada: implementar inovações em fases controladas, permitindo validação adequada sem comprometer a infraestrutura existente. Em minha experiência, o sucesso reside em estabelecer "zonas de inovação" isoladas dentro da arquitetura, onde novas tecnologias podem ser testadas com riscos minimizados. Paralelamente, mantemos um núcleo estável que garante a continuidade dos serviços essenciais. Esta estratégia de "inovação controlada" tem se mostrado eficaz em diversos projetos.

There types of innovation can be categorized into two buckets: 1. Incremental and 2. Disruptive. The former might be simpler to integrate in an existing or variant of a product and proper CI/CD would ensure reliability of the solution. The latter is more challenging and it might be useful to run a parallel prototype and further tests (with customer validation) before moving this to the product. In the end, it is about getting the right amount of confidence in the innovation to make it happen in the product.

Balancing innovation with reliability is less about procedures and more about priorities. Rapid feature releases and new tech can increase system complexity and introduce risks, especially if untested. Excessive change can also alienate users who often value consistency over disruption. Stepping back to assess the true user impact of each innovation can help. Sometimes, the best choice is reinforcing stable, familiar solutions that meet user needs, rather than adopting every new trend. Real balance means creating a thoughtful culture that weighs stability alongside innovation, ensuring long-term value and trust.

System architecture is a set of components - large and small - composed and configured on some infrastructure in the cloud or data center. Innovation on the system level comes from building unique components, unique way of composing components, or both. (Unique infrastructure is a rare thing better left to cloud providers). Reliability must be designed and thoroughly tested for any unique component and for any unique connections between components. Balancing comes from not allowing your team to build too much new and/or unique stuff.