Shipping fast and safe: Building a culture of low-risk learning

We build a culture of low-risk learning at Intercom by shipping as quickly as possible while minimizing risk. We encourage engineers to ship small changes, known as "cupcakes," frequently and invest in our delivery pipeline to make deployments delightful and easy. To minimize risk, we employ techniques such as being available after shipping, shipping instrumentation first, using feature flags, shipping to a small subset of traffic, shipping the "read" path first, and documenting and sharing our plan and actions. These methods enable us to create a safe environment for engineers to learn from production while providing real value to our customers.