Some of our largest customers have thousands of members across hundreds of projects using LaunchDarkly to practice good feature management. While it’s exciting for us to see so many customers adopting and scaling their use of LaunchDarkly, we recognize that managing account members across multiple teams has become an unruly responsibility for some account admins.
Although we appreciate the manual workarounds that a lot of creative users have developed, our team’s been hard at work to provide you with first-class functionality to help address all of the above.
Introducing teams in LaunchDarkly
“Teams” enables account admins to better organize and manage your organization’s use of LaunchDarkly. A new team entity gives you the ability to group members into teams to better reflect your organizational structure within the LaunchDarkly application.
Creating teams
To get started, assign members to a team by searching for and selecting them from the member list or perform a bulk team assignment by either copying and pasting a list of email addresses or uploading a CSV file of email addresses.
Permissions for a team
The ability to group members into a team makes it easier for admins to manage member access by allowing permissions to be applied to an entire team. Each member can be individually assigned a role with limited access—such as the reader role—when they are initially invited to LaunchDarkly, and then can be given more granular permissions through their team’s custom roles.
Team maintainers
We also introduced a new role, team maintainer, that empowers team leads—who are closer to team management than the typical account admin or owner—to manage the composition of the team. This will reduce the toil on the account admins when managing several projects, roles, and members within their LaunchDarkly account by decentralizing administration and granting autonomy to teams to manage their own onboarding/offboarding. The end result will help free up the account admins to focus more on account-level activities, such as security and billing.
Getting started
Teams is available now to all Enterprise plan customers. For more details on creating and managing teams in LaunchDarkly, read our documentation. By default, all account admins and owners can create and manage teams. Alternatively, they can create custom roles scoped to specific actions and assign them to other team members. Lastly, you can also use the Teams API to integrate or automate team actions.
For different strategies on building teams in LaunchDarkly, depending on where your organization is at with your usage of the platform and your goals around team management, read our best practices guide.
Coming soon
We’re so excited for you to start using our new teams feature, and want you to know about some of the other improvements we have planned around it, including:
- Provisioning teams via identity provider (IdP): Customers who use SSO with LaunchDarkly will be able to automatically sync groups that are defined in their IdP (Okta, Azure, G Suite, etc.) with teams in LaunchDarkly. This would eliminate the manual process to add/remove members to/from teams in LaunchDarkly and keep teams up-to-date with internal changes.
- Extend existing LaunchDarkly features to be utilized by teams: Including approvals by team, flag and metric maintainers by team, dashboard filters by team, team notifications, and more.
- More secure view permissions: We understand that certain teams, projects, and environments require more restricted access than others—especially if you’re in a heavily regulated industry. By introducing a new, “no access” built-in role, you can invite a new team member and be sure that they can only view the resources to which you specifically grant them access through team permissions. We are also building more granular, view access, custom-role actions such as on SDK keys.
And much, much more!
Let us know what you’d like to see built in the future or if you have any questions or feedback by reaching out to us at product@launchdarkly.com.
As new features for teams are built, we are giving a sneak preview to our Early Access Program members, so sign up here if you’re interested.
