It’s that time of year. Go ahead, grab a piping hot cup of your favorite beverage, block your calendar, and get ready to dig in. The 2023 Gartner Hype Cycle™ for Agile and DevOps is here! I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be the only leader in your space that hasn’t brushed up on which tech trends are rising in value. I believe the report is a bit like a crystal ball that helps business and technology leaders chart the future of their businesses.
Even if you’re not familiar with Gartner Hype Cycle, don’t worry, I got you! Put simply, Gartner Hype Cycle provides a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities. The methodology gives you a view of how a technology or application will evolve over time, providing a sound source of insight to manage its deployment within the context of your specific business goals.
The report categorizes tech trends into five stages: the Innovation Trigger, Peak of Inflated Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment, and Plateau of Productivity.
Feature management has always been around
Having spent my early career at some of the world's largest tech juggernauts, I only now realize that I was using feature management to inform my day-to-day product and user experience decisions—without even knowing it!
In the early days, companies like Google created extensive, homegrown flagging systems to help us do things like test new experiences in production, experiment on tiny slices of our audiences, and use canary deployments to ensure safe rollouts. We were doing these things 20 years ago before it ever had the formality of a “category” name.
What is feature management and why does it matter for business leaders?
In a nutshell, feature management is a set of practices that empower development teams to release, control, and optimize software features in real time. It is the separation of a developer's code from the deployment that puts a product into customers' hands. It’s central to everything we do at LaunchDarkly, and it’s this “secret sauce” that allows business leaders to boost developer productivity, improve morale, accelerate innovation—and achieve peace of mind over their software. I mean, unless you just really enjoy getting 2am Slack messages. You do you! :)
"Feature management is the separation of a developer's code from the deployment that puts a product into customers' hands."
In the new 2023 report, feature management is closer than ever to the final stage—The Plateau of Productivity.
What does this mean? Quite simply, we believe feature management has moved from being a nascent, misunderstood aspiration to a standard method for delivering high business benefits with less risk. This mention in the Slope of Enlightenment phase confirms that more and more leaders are beginning to buy into the power and promise of Feature Management, allowing them to see efficient and innovative software teams reach their full potential.
In other words, like any worthwhile movement, it’s gathering momentum.
I recently hosted a webinar with Mike McKay, Executive Director, Leading SRE & Innovation for NCR, where he laid out what his ideal future state looks like.
“Being able to control how your application scales is invaluable. We need to be able to not only control what features need to be released but how your entire system reacts and behaves. That’s my dream.”
I recommend you watch the recorded webinar with Mike. Topics ranged from common dev pain points, how feature management can solve business challenges, and how to select a feature management solution that brings you value.
Feature management: More than just a DevOps tool
Those in the industry know that feature management offers "high business benefits." And now Gartner mentioned the business impact. “Almost all businesses can benefit from faster, more reliable delivery of software—the impact of feature management in that sense could be universal. Experimentation has already had a large impact on digital marketing and digital consumer product development, where human responses are hard to predict.'' These enhancements are realized through:
- High-resolution personalization
- Real-time A/B testing
- Increased velocity of product development
Ultimately, these features allow companies to become highly responsive to shifting market characteristics.
Feature management is not a piece of dev tooling. It’s a fundamental shift in the way that modern software gets made and delivered. We are entering a new world of software development where risky all-or-nothing rollouts will be a distant memory you tell your kids about around a campfire.
"We are entering a new world of software development where risky all-or-nothing rollouts will be a distant memory you tell your kids about around a campfire."
Even the most basic feature management practices absorb the risks of the past, allowing you to incrementally release updates to specific user segments while monitoring impacts in real-time. You can roll back or innovate forward, while minimizing the business risks historically associated with software changes. Feature management gives you total control, helping you deliver optimal customer experiences, drive revenue, and spend your time on higher order thinking.
In-house vs. Feature Management Saas
Engineering teams will often build feature flag systems in-house. In many cases, these types of systems pose scalability and security risks. They also lack key capabilities—e.g., progressive rollouts, real-time rollbacks, and robust targeting—which are needed to release software with control and confidence. Maintaining an in-house feature flagging tool is also expensive and complex. It's not a question of IF, but when such systems might falter.
So when you ask the question, “Do I build my own or do I buy it?” you should know what your engineers need in order to bring value and efficiency to the business. They want unified release processes so they can focus on innovation. The ideal solution would preemptively address errors and enable developers to prioritize innovation.
The road ahead
So, what’s next? I highly recommend diving into the full Gartner Hype Cycle report to explore adoption drivers, obstacles, and user recommendations for feature management and other emerging technologies in Agile and DevOps. Consider it required reading for anyone invested in shaping the future of their organization.
For more insights into feature management and its role in enterprise strategy, stay tuned to the LaunchDarkly Blog.
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Gartner, Hype Cycle for Agile and DevOps, 2023, Keith Mann, Joachim Herschmann, and 1 more, 27 July 2023
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