Who uses feature flags?
Feature flags aren’t just for engineering or development teams. Flags can be used by:
- Sales and Customer Support to provision entitlements.
- Product Management to manage beta programs.
- Marketing to run A/B tests.
Feature management is commonly used at companies of all sizes and across all verticals that are looking to:
- Reduce the number of code rollbacks.
- Gradually roll out new functionality to users.
- Minimize risk by first releasing to small groups of users.
- Test user acceptance.
Companies using continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) or Progressive Delivery rely on feature flag management to gradually roll out features. Continuous delivery gives you the ability to shorten release cycles and get new functionality in the user’s hands quickly and safely. Progressive Delivery kicks it up a notch and provides fine-grained control over the rollout and ownership of a feature. Progressive Delivery includes user segmentation, traffic management, observability, and automation to release features to small groups of users.
Through these delivery processes, teams develop a cadence for lean releases, where new code is wrapped in feature flags. Features are gradually rolled out to the user base to validate their integrity and minimize the risk to your platform and company.
