Heetch is a ride-sharing company headquartered in Paris, helping locals and visitors use their cell phones to hail rides across France, Belgium, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Problem
Before partnering with LaunchDarkly, Heetch used a homegrown feature flagging system. Their release process lacked standardization and forced product managers to submit a request to engineering each time a flag change was needed. It was difficult to integrate business requirements from the data team into their software delivery process, and they wasted many cycles trying to run failed experiments. The product team needed a solution that would enable them to release the right features faster and with less friction.
The Solution
Heetch evaluated several vendors and chose LaunchDarkly for its ease of use, market maturity, and broad SDK availability. While their previous solution required dedicated engineering resources to operate, LaunchDarkly has now been ingrained into every step of product delivery across engineering, product management, and operations.
With LaunchDarkly, the product team has been able to standardize its release practices to ship updates more quickly and confidently. LaunchDarkly has become so fundamental to their release processes that Eric Palle, Principal Engineer at Heetch, built an internal Center of Excellence for using LaunchDarkly. All functional teams can now self-serve and easily adhere to best practices, without having to call Eric as the product owner for help.
The Outcome
“It’s very powerful to be able to change user experiences with a single click.” – Eric Palle, Principal Engineer, Heetch
Adopting LaunchDarkly has given product managers at Heetch more granular control of user experiences. Product managers can now control percentage rollouts or release specific features to target user segments with just a couple of clicks. Working side-by-side with data analysts, they’re able to use business logic to surface the right features to the right customers, in real-time—without endless engineering requests.
By separating deploy from release and enabling product managers to execute their own rollout strategies, Heetch is able to deliver features to their customers more quickly. For example, the Heetch team used LaunchDarkly to display banners containing COVID safety information targeted by location.
The Heetch team plans to continue working with LaunchDarkly to better empower cross-functional teams and release more quickly and safely.
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