In an effort to run smoothly, it's crucial to learn from past mistakes like Knights Capital's 2012 system failure that cost $460 million. This experience highlights the importance of designing, implementing, and optimizing system components, especially for continuous integration and deployment processes. A well-managed CI/CD process can help development teams manage updates efficiently by using feature toggles and feature context to dictate code routing, storing log data for easy access, and creating an error database with fast lookups - all supported by Redis.