November 2020 Summaries

Heetch, a ride-sharing company based in Paris, initially used a homegrown feature flagging system that lacked standardization and required product managers to request changes from engineering each time. The company sought a solution to release features more quickly and with less friction. After evaluating several vendors, Heetch chose LaunchDarkly for its ease of use, market maturity, and broad SDK availability. With LaunchDarkly, the product team has standardized its release practices, enabling them to ship updates more quickly and confidently. The adoption of LaunchDarkly has given product managers at Heetch more granular control over user experiences, allowing for real-time feature releases based on business logic without engineering requests.

Embracing failure is crucial for fostering innovation, growth, and improvement. In the software engineering industry, it's essential to remove the stigma associated with failing by talking about our failures and viewing them as learning opportunities rather than times for shaming or ridicule. Adopting a growth mindset, creating a blameless culture, fostering psychological safety, remembering the importance of play, and experimenting are key areas to focus on when embracing failure. By doing so, we can learn from our mistakes, improve our processes, and ultimately achieve success in our work.

LaunchDarkly introduces scheduling workflows for Enterprise customers, allowing teams to plan and automate progressive rollouts and flag updates in advance. This feature enables users to create complex release strategies by scheduling incremental steps ahead of time. Key benefits include timing a feature launch, managing progressive rollouts, and controlling limited-time user access. LaunchDarkly is working on additional automation capabilities such as approval-based workflows and metrics-driven flag triggers to enhance feature management.