Fortune 100 Health Insurer minimizes downtime for members with controlled, automated software releases

This organization, part of a Fortune 100 health services provider, delivers digital healthcare experiences to more than 12 million members across web, mobile, and backend platforms. The release engineering team supports code changes and releases for dozens of microservices and feature teams across a large multi-platform product.

Their work spans backend services, mobile applications, and infrastructure platforms, ensuring secure, compliant, and reliable software delivery in a regulated healthcare environment.

A Senior Release Manager on the release engineering team recognized that the legacy release process was a liability. The system lacked speed and safety. When something went wrong, rollback required manual intervention and, sometimes, hours of work. 

Release approvals relied on a manual, multi-step workflow involving Word templates, email chains, and copy-pasting across multiple systems. Engineers filled out forms by hand and posted them to Teams, where each approver had to respond individually. They then transferred those approvals into Rally and Quickbase, pasted screenshots into specific fields, and emailed executives for final sign-off. For audits, they often had to dig up approvals across systems and replicate the same data in multiple places, often doing these tasks ten times over for a single release. It wasn’t unusual for the approval process to take longer than the coding itself.

To modernize the release process, the team began by building a new automation layer using Power Automate, ServiceNow, and SharePoint. That removed 95% of the manual workflow required for approvals and created an auditable system of record.

The release management team uses LaunchDarkly to ship code to production at any time using the automated approval process, and then control when and how that code is exposed. They can gate features behind internal approvals or testing checkpoints, gradually roll out changes to specific user segments, and instantly disable functionality if an upstream dependency fails. This level of control enables safer testing in production and rapid response to risk, all without the need to revert code.

LaunchDarkly is gaining more widespread adoption across frontend, backend, mobile, and infrastructure teams. Product owners using feature flags can manage feature exposure without needing additional engineering work, and teams commonly toggle flags during daytime hours rather than deploying late at night. Flags are increasingly treated as a standard part of the release process, resulting in safer releases, fewer incidents, and considerable time savings.

The release team scaled from 60-80 releases per month to 150-200 releases per month while maintaining a two-person team. Most releases happen during the workday, thanks to the assurance provided by LaunchDarkly granular controls.

Key outcomes include:

• 160-320 engineering hours saved each month after Power Automate workflow and LaunchDarkly implementation
• 3.91% change failure rate with very few issues impacting customer awareness because of rapid rollbacks
• 3-5 minutes from approval to deployment, decreased from several days
• 2–5 hours saved by each team per month on DORA reporting tasks
• 5 - 10 rollback events avoided each year

The integration with SharePoint and Power BI enables one-click DORA metrics reporting across 50+ applications, helping teams measure and improve their delivery pipelines. Flag usage is tracked and standardized, creating a foundation for even more advanced strategies like A/B testing and automated rollbacks.

This new process isn't just a technical upgrade. It's a model for delivering at scale without compromising safety, compliance, or speed. And it's replicable.

With feature management and automation at the center of its delivery process, the team has proven that it can scale releases, reduce risk, and support more teams without adding headcount. Their vision is a future where deployments happen continuously, features are always behind flags, and releases can be flipped on safely at any time of day.