In this year's State of Feature Management, you'll learn why companies are investing in feature management, despite uncertain economic conditions.
For this year's report, we again partnered with an independent research firm to survey 1,000 software and IT professionals—more than double the amount we spoke with last year.
Among our key findings for 2022:
- Mission critical: 70% of survey respondents say their company leaders view feature management as a mission-critical or high-priority investment
- Sizable ROI: Virtually all who use feature flags (98%) agree they save their company money and deliver a demonstrable ROI
- Maturity matters: As organizations move from using feature flags in an ad-hoc manner (less mature) to standardizing flags on a single team (more mature), their performance dips. But as they keep maturing, their performance appears to rise over time
In this post, we'll recap some of our other findings, and talk about the potential implications.
Investments in feature management rising
In fact, despite the broad economic downturn, all of our survey respondents stated that their company's IT budget for feature management should increase in the upcoming year:
- 74% of respondents say their budget needs to increase by over $100K, including 80% of senior executives
- 23% say by $250-499K
- 7% say by over $1M
Clear majorities of those who use feature management say they’ve seen improved processes as a result, especially around software delivery speed (84%), application reliability (87%), and developer productivity (87%). In fact, virtually all of the respondents who use feature flags (98%) agree that toggles save their company money and deliver a demonstrable ROI.
Many newcomers to feature management
We know feature management is still a relatively new concept, and there's many teams just discovering it. Our report found a lot of newcomers to feature management: 60% of respondents started using feature flags within the last year, perhaps suggesting a rapid rise in adoption.
In general, we found that organizations of many sizes vary widely in their initial reasons for adopting feature management. But in practice, they gravitate toward similar use cases.
The two most common use cases are long-term operational controls (55% of respondents) and entitlements (47%). Interestingly, both use cases rely on long-term/permanent feature flags. This suggests that flags are playing a foundational, enduring role in enabling organizations to both deliver and maintain the reliability of their software.
Who is using feature management and how
The majority of respondents (81%) have standardized feature management on a single team, multiple teams, and/or across the entire organization. Through this lens of feature management adoption, we've begun to identify an emerging maturity model for feature management, which we go into more detail about in the report. In particular, we observed a pattern associated with maturity and software delivery performance and reliability.
As organizations move from using flags in an ad hoc manner (less mature) to standardizing feature management on a single team (more mature), their performance dips. But as they keep maturing, their performance improves. Though organizations may face growing pains when first scaling the practice of feature management, it appears that, if they persist, they reap the rewards of their investment down the road.
Perhaps surprisingly, of all the roles within an organization who interact with feature flags, IT operators (43%) are the most prevalent—even more than software developers (40%). The high percentage of IT operators reinforces the idea that feature management is playing a critical infrastructure role for organizations.
Thanks to all who participated. For the full breakdown, check out the report.
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