Wow, three years goes by in a blink of an eye. Three years ago John (LaunchDarkly co-founder) and I both started working full time on LaunchDarkly. We had an idea that we could draw on both of our experiences in software development to help make better software. Funnily, John and I had wanted to start a company together for a long time, but thought we didn't know enough about any field. So, in the meantime, we'd both continued to work in software for decades. As it turned out, we know a lot about software development lifecycle and managing features effectively.
Now we have customers all over the world (literally) who use our software to eliminate risk and for feature management. One of the favorite parts of my job is to visit customers - I love hearing how they're using LaunchDarkly and how we can help them manage features. Just in the last four weeks I've visited customers in Singapore and Switzerland. And amazing to me, their use cases were very similar - moving away from long lived branches, getting code out more quickly. A CTO in Hong Kong made a brilliant analogy of feature toggling to “lean manufacturing”. The idea of lean came from Toyota; if you circulate through your inventory more quickly, you can be more productive. The same can be applied to code - the quicker you can get it out to the real world, the more effective you can be in validating your ideas and honing its quality. I'm proud that not only do customers love us with a high NPS, but we were also recognized by Gartner this year as a Cool Vendor in DevOps.
Also, the company itself has grown. We have our own office now in Oakland! It's in a beautiful Art Deco tower, and we are still able to enjoy eating lunch together every day. One of the happiest things the team did lately was rotate all the lunch tables so we had one long table (Hogwarts style). The team didn't want anyone to have to sit alone if there was no room at a table. Adam Zimman, our VP Product, summed up why he liked working here with “I feel like I can bring my whole self to work; and I'd like to build a culture where everyone feels that way.”
What's next for LaunchDarkly? We've got more functionality coming to help you with effective feature management. We're hiring! And we'll also be on the road more - we'll be at NDC Sydney and Atlassian Summit. I recently met Jeff Lawson from Twilio - he mentioned to me he tries to meet with three customers a week, a worthy goal. My goal for the next year is to meet with at least two customers a week. Come by, say “hi!” We'd love to hear how you're doing feature management.
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