Living companies must innovate to survive; staying still means falling behind.
In the fast-paced world of technology, companies must balance the tension between two critical priorities: keeping the lights on (KTLO) and driving forward with new project deliverables and markets. For tech leaders, striking the balance between these competing demands can mean the difference between operational efficiency and innovation paralysis.
KTLO vs Project Deliverables
KTLO refers to the practice of maintaining business as usual (BAU) such as essential maintenance, bug fixes, infrastructure support, and operations necessary for existing activities and systems to run smoothly. While essential for operational efficiency and customer retention, KTLO is often considered as what is necessary for survival today, rather than a driver of growth.
On the other hand, project deliverables involve creating new features, products or initiatives, or venturing into entirely new markets in a bid to propel a business forward. These projects generate revenue, enhance user experience (UX), and help companies to differentiate themselves in a competitive market. However, they usually require an element of risk, as well as diverting resources away from KTLO.
The Cost of Imbalance
As with any balancing act, there’s a sweet spot, and where exactly that is will depend on your organization and where it is in terms of growth and stability. There are also risks of tipping too much either way.
If you over-emphasize KTLO, you risk limiting your growth opportunities and inhibiting radical innovation, which could leave you behind your competitors. You may also build employee dissatisfaction; tech teams are inherently curious and limiting their capacity to innovate may have your best engineers and designers looking for greater challenges elsewhere. There’s also the risk of missed market opportunities if you’re overly cautious with your approach to radical innovation and place too much emphasis on KTLO.
It can go the other way, too. By ditching the “mundane” KTLO activities and focusing too much on shiny new opportunities, you will be at risk of neglecting existing products and, vitally, customers.
From a technical perspective, there’s a greater risk of system failures, which could also put your existing customer base at risk. And, while keeping it simple may lead to frustrated tech talent, over-prioritizing project deliverables could lead to burnout among teams who find themselves firefighting instead of performing strategically.
Striking the balance
There’s no hard and fast rule for how much time should be spent on KTLO and how much should be spent on innovation, but by deciding what kind of organization you’re running and considering a realistic split of activities, you can make sure that you optimize both. You could consider an 80/20, 70/30, or even 60/40 split, depending on the type of organization that you have and what your growth ambitions are.
Companies who are well-established in their market might opt for 60% KTLO and 40% innovation, whereas organizations committed to being leaders in a fast-paced environment are more likely to allocate up to 80% of their tech resources towards innovation, with the remaining 20% preserved for maintenance and technical debt reduction.
With that in mind, it’s necessary to split your innovation down further: how much emphasis do you want to place on exploitative efforts, which will help you to maximize market presence and growth for existing products and services; how much will be spent on explorative innovation, which examines new opportunities and markets, and how much will be somewhere in between: delivering existing products to new markets, or improved products to your existing customer base?
Rotational KTLO
By rotating KTLO assignments, it’s often easier to keep enthusiastic tech teams excited and engaged. Rather than assigning a designated maintenance team, which can lead to siloed knowledge, burnout, and staff dissatisfaction, take a leaf out of Amazon and Microsoft’s books and rotate your engineers through KTLO activities. This spreads knowledge throughout teams, mitigating risks should someone leave, and makes sure that everyone has the opportunity to innovate, creating a diverse pool of ideas and an environment ripe for innovation.
KPIs and Metrics for Prioritization
In a rapidly changing industry, data-driven decision-making is vital. To help balance KTLO and project deliverables, leaders need to track the technical debt backlog, embedding it into sprint planning rather than adding it as an afterthought.
They must also monitor system reliability metrics, measuring downtime, latency and error rates to understand when incremental innovation is needed to support KTLO activities. Feature velocity is another important metric; product launches and overall performance slowing down due to recurring operational issues are clear indicators that not enough time is being spent on KTLO innovation and/or maintenance.
KPIs will help leaders to quantify the impact of activities, making it easier to identify and mitigate risks, as well as justify resource allocation decisions to stakeholders at all levels.
Leverage the Power of Automation
Modern DevOps practices make it possible for organizations to automate a range of KTLO tasks. Practices such as continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), AI-driven monitoring, and infrastructure as code can be automated, allowing teams to spend less time on maintenance work and more time on project deliverables.
The power of automation goes beyond day-to-day activities; automation in incident response can be a great example. AI-driven alerts that detect potential system failures can reduce time troubleshooting, while deploying automation to support infrastructure scaling and monitoring can improve stability without constant human intervention.
Create a Culture that Values Performance and Innovation
Successful tech leaders create a culture where efficiency and impact today are as highly valued as innovation tomorrow. Rather than celebrating just the shiny new innovations, leaders need to celebrate the KTLO wins: improved system uptime, lower latency, or reduced technical debt, to ensure that KTLO is seen as valuable rather than a burden.
Encourage Cross-Functional Collaboration
Cross-functional teams consisting of product managers, engineers, designers, and site reliability engineers can help to make sure that both KTLO and project deliverables receive the attention that they need. This collaboration will promote balance across all functions, allowing maintenance and innovation to be seen as core to the overall business strategy.
For example, by working closely with engineers to identify usability improvements within existing systems, UX designers can reduce friction for both end users and internal stakeholders. Similarly, security teams should be embedded in development cycles to ensure compliance and risk mitigation are not neglected in favor of speed.
Embed KTLO and Innovation in Your Strategy
Rather than treating KTLO as a separate function, integrate it into the overall technology roadmap as well as your short and long-term strategy. By explicitly scheduling technical debt reduction and maintenance alongside feature development, teams can proactively address stability while continuing to push forward with new initiatives.
Many companies have adopted internal roadmaps where every sprint includes a balance of new features and stability improvements. This ensures that maintenance isn't an afterthought, but a critical part of the development lifecycle.
Conclusion
It’s easy for organizations, especially small ones, to think that all innovation stems from project deliverables. However, while project deliverables usually involve radical, game-changing and explorative innovation, KTLO activities benefit hugely from incremental, exploitative innovation such as minor tweaks to existing products and processes to improve efficiency and hence profitability.
By placing equal value on both KTLO and project deliverables, it’s possible to achieve the balance between market leadership today, and undertaking the evolution necessary to survive long-term within the tech industry.
Engaging the right teams to support this balance is vital. If you’re a tech recruiter looking to build a strong team that can support their long-term growth, get in touch.
