LaunchDarkly drives high innovation velocity, operational efficiency, and revenue growth
In April 2024, LaunchDarkly enlisted Wakefield Research, a third-party firm, to conduct a survey of 250 LaunchDarkly customers. The results show unequivocally that the LaunchDarkly feature management and experimentation platform drives positive business outcomes for customers. They also reveal trends in use cases, adoption levels, and feature management maturity.
Explore the survey results below to discover the tangible business impact of LaunchDarkly. And see how you compare to surveyed customers in terms of software engineering performance and feature management maturity.
(We also ran a survey comparing software engineering and business performance between LaunchDarkly customers and non-customers. View the results here if you're interested)
Tangible business impact
Innovation velocity, cost-savings, and revenue growth
95% of surveyed customers agree that “LaunchDarkly has a positive impact on organizational performance such as revenue, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiency."
This finding echoes what we often hear from customers: they regard LaunchDarkly as an indispensable solution in their DevOps stack that makes a big impact across multiple areas of the business.
90% of surveyed customers agree that LaunchDarkly has helped increase their innovation velocity.
LaunchDarkly helps customers increase their innovation velocity by 1) reducing the risk of delivering software dramatically, and 2) giving customers extreme control over what, when, and to whom they release. Here are a few examples:
- Autodesk increases release velocity by 500%
- Paramount improves developer productivity 100x
- Christian Dior shortens time to market from 15 minutes to instant updates
Customers reported that LaunchDarkly has helped increase revenue, in some cases by over 50%
- 11% of customers estimate that LaunchDarkly has helped increase revenue growth by more than 50%
- 41% estimate an increase between 10% to 49%
- 33% estimate an increase of up to 10%
“In your estimation, how much has LaunchDarkly helped increase revenue growth tied to your software products?”
LaunchDarkly helps customers increase revenue by enabling them to ship valuable software innovations faster. Also, the LaunchDarkly targeting engine enables them to deliver personalized experiences to users, in turn, increasing engagement and satisfaction. What’s more, developers and product managers can easily run beta tests and experiments with LaunchDarkly. By collecting and acting upon data early on, they end up releasing features that perform exceedingly well in the market. All of this can help drive revenue.
LaunchDarkly reduces the operational costs of software delivery
- 8% of customers say LaunchDarkly has reduced their operational costs by over 50%.
- 59% say LaunchDarkly has reduced their operational costs between 11% and 50%.
- 26% say LaunchDarkly has reduced their operational costs up to 10%.
“In your estimation, by how much has LaunchDarkly helped reduce your operational costs tied to software delivery?”
LaunchDarkly reduces the operational costs of software delivery by eliminating "big-bang" releases. A big-bang release looks like this:
Dozens—or hundreds—of highly-paid engineering personnel assemble at midnight or on the weekend to execute a major software launch. The launch includes updates from multiple development teams, all of whom had to a) run their changes through extensive pre-production testing, and b) wait for QA to approve every team's changes before merging their feature branches with the mainline—at which point costly merge conflicts arise. The fear of the release causing an outage looms large with a big-bang release.
With LaunchDarkly feature flags, developers can safely test their code in a realistic production environment. This spares them the expense of maintaining staging environments that unreliably simulate production. What's more, teams—or even individual developers—can safely merge and deploy their code as soon as it's ready. And a single person can release that code patch whenever they choose. Should the patch degrade system performance, one person can disable it instantly in LaunchDarkly. Where there once was fear, there now is confidence...and lower operational costs.
Software delivery and operational performance
See how you compare to LaunchDarkly customers when it comes to deployment frequency, MTTR, software reliability, and other engineering performance markers.
Deployment frequency
“For the primary software service or application that your team works on, how often do you deploy new code to production?”
Mean time to recover (MTTR) from incidents
“When a software incident occurs in the primary software service or application that your team works on, what is your mean time to recover (MTTR) from the incident?”
A majority of LaunchDarkly customers (86%) recover from incidents in a day or less, with 42% recovering within an hour, if not minutes.
Frequency of software reliability issues
“How often is the primary software service or application you work on unavailable, slow, or operating incorrectly?”
Number of people required to execute a release (release overhead)
“How many people (developers, IT operators, QA engineers, development managers, etc.) are typically required to execute a software release?”
Interestingly, nearly 70% of customers only require five people or less to execute a software release. This suggests that, for our customers, the overhead associated with delivering software—at least in terms of labor resources—is quite low. It’s not uncommon for engineering teams to require dozens, if not hundreds, of engineering personnel to execute a release. The fact that most LaunchDarkly customers can count on one hand the number of people they need for a launch is significant.
Feature management maturity and usage trends
Use cases
“How does your team use LaunchDarkly?”
The top 3 most popular use cases for LaunchDarkly were dark launches, testing in production (canary tests), and progressive delivery.
- Dark launches - turning features on/off for all users
- Testing in production (canary tests) - testing features with a subset of users to measure operational impact
- Progressive delivery - gradually releasing to increasingly large segments (includes percentage rollouts)
- Beta tests - testing features with a subset of external users to gather qualitative feedback
- Experimentation - running A/B and multivariate tests to gather quantitative data
- Long-term operational controls - using permanent flags for things like load shedding during high-traffic periods
- Trunk-based development – smaller, more frequent updates to a main trunk
- Entitlements and plan management - controlling feature/product access based on things like customer tier
Level of LaunchDarkly adoption
“Which best describes your organization's level of adoption of LaunchDarkly?”
A majority of LaunchDarkly customers (87%) have standardized their use of the platform on at least one team. Twenty-four percent have centralized and standardized their use of the platform across their entire organization, which represents a high degree of feature management maturity.
Feature flag usage
“For what percentage of code changes (frontend and backend) does your team use LaunchDarkly feature flags?”
Roughly one-fifth of LaunchDarkly customers (19%) use feature flags for more than 50% of software changes that they push to production. But most customers use flags for fewer than 50% of changes.
Integrations
“How many of the LaunchDarkly integrations (e.g., with Datadog, Github, Jira Cloud, Slack, etc.) does your team use?”
LaunchDarkly helps streamline critical workflows with 60+ integrations with popular tools in the modern DevOps tool chain like Datadog, GitHub, Jira Cloud, ServiceNow, and Slack. Currently, a majority of customers (89%) only leverage between zero and five integrations.
Automation
“Which of the LaunchDarkly automation features does your team use?”
LaunchDarkly offers several capabilities that automate workflows in software delivery, remediation, and change management. Far and away, the most popular of those automation capabilities are Approvals (41% of customers use Approvals) and Slack alerts (40% of customers).
- Approvals - automatically require and issue flag change approvals
- Automatic Slack alerts of flag updates and/or change approvals
- Scheduling of software releases in advance
- Flag triggers/Automatic kill switches - automatically turn ‘off’ a flag when your observability tool detects a critical service issue
- Release Assistant - deliver features through repeatable release pipelines that follow an ordered set of environments and targeting rules
- Automatic flag syncing with Jira Cloud
- Automatic generation of ServiceNow tickets
Conclusion
LaunchDarkly customers have spoken. The LaunchDarkly platform has a material impact on the bottom line, improving everything from operational efficiency and innovation velocity to revenue growth and customer satisfaction.
In a software-powered world, LaunchDarkly enables product delivery teams to ship software faster, more intelligently, and with less risk.
If you’re interested in seeing a live demo of the LaunchDarkly feature management and experimentation platform, request a demo here. You may also start a free trial of the product. To learn more about LaunchDarkly and how it may transform the way you deliver software, visit launchdarkly.com.
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About the survey
The LaunchDarkly Customer Survey was conducted by Wakefield Research (www.wakefieldresearch.com) among 250 DevOps and IT Professionals, between April 23rd and May 1st, 2024, using an email invitation distributed by LaunchDarkly.
Respondents spanned multiple industries, company sizes, and annual revenue amounts. They also ranged from individual contributors to C-level executives, including job titles such as Software Developer, VP of Engineering, IT Director, Platform Engineer, CTO, and more. Results of any sample are subject to sampling variation.
