We were going to have ChatGPT craft this year-end recap so we could go back to grabbing from the holiday popcorn tin, but it was a task too tall for the lauded AI robot.
Maybe next year. Â
In any case, 2022 was another exciting year at LaunchDarkly. Our team again put its collective heart into helping improve software releases for organizations of all sizes. And we were able to connect with many of our customers face-to-face in way we haven't been able to in years.
In this post, we'll share some of our highlights from the year in LaunchDarkly before we enter 2023.
Making LaunchDarkly the best feature management platform on Earth
You've probably heard us say this before: Software powers the world. LaunchDarkly empowers all teams to deliver and control their software.
Part of that foundational focus includes ensuring our customers are using the best feature management platform available.Â
This year, we delivered product updates that ranged from a deeper experimentation offering to efforts that'll help with release management at scale.
Here are some notable product updates you may have missed:
- Driven by feedback from hundreds of customers looking for a better way to run practical, meaningful experiments, LaunchDarkly Experimentation blends our expertise in seamless feature delivery with experimentation best practices.Â
- Teams is a feature that helps those who are scaling LaunchDarkly out at large organizations with thousands of members and hundreds of projects. Learn more.Â
- Flag defaults let you create and reuse optimal flag configurations.
- Workflow Builder is a fresh, visual way to automate the rollout of feature flags.
- Feature Workflows allows you to disable flags during maintenance windows and re-enable afterward.
- Ensure repeatable release processes with Workflow Templates.
- Our new Cloudflare integration gives you greater flag evaluation speeds in your edge.
And if you want to catch up on all our product updates from 2022, we've got you covered.Â
A Galaxy near you
There haven't been as many opportunities to meet face-to-face with customers in the past couple years, so we went for it with the travelling Galaxy conference.Â
From June through October, throughout the United States, Galaxy visited five cities—San Francisco, Atlanta, New York City, Austin, and Chicago—with the goal of improving both your use of both LaunchDarkly and the processes surrounding feature management. At each stop, we held a series of keynotes, workshops, and networking sessions.
There's so much useful information that was shared throughout our Galaxy conference events that you should check our our recap and browse some of the on-demand sessions.
Thinking like a high-performing team
Everyone wants their development team to be high-performing or even elite, but it's obviously not that simple. So where to start? In this webinar, Cody De Arkland, Director of Developer Relations at LaunchDarkly, spoke with author, researcher, and the founder of IT Revolution, Gene Kim, about how teams can transform from themselves into higher achieving. As the title suggests, the first step is getting into the right mindframe.Â
Understanding the importance of psychological safety in software releases
Mistakes happen. So when developers and engineers are held to rigid standards and processes, they can feel too constrained and fearful of failure. For the larger organization, a highly-focused attitude around avoiding misfires can impact everything from retention to stifling the ability to create meaningful progress that could separate a product from its competition.
We explored some of these insights and questions in our report, "Release assurance: Why innovative software delivery starts with trust and psychological safety." To gather data for the report, we worked with an independent firm to survey 500 developers of varying titles and industries.
The results spotlight ways companies are mismanaging releases and missing opportunities with development teams. We also offer some potential steps that can be taken to improve overall output. Check it out here.Â
Entering orbit through Trajectory
Each year, Trajectory is our opportunity to bring together our customers, team, and community to present talks related not just to the world of feature management, but also to the wider world of software development.Â
Over the past year, we’ve seen a lot of shifts in the software industry as a whole; as demand has increased for faster delivery of software and platforms, a higher bar for user experience, and great controls around things like security and cost have also emerged.Â
This year's Trajectory featured an array of talks from our staff, plus representatives from General Motors, Datadog, Chronosphere, FireHyrdrant, and more. Check out our full recap or watch all the talks here, plus many more from years past.
Sizing up the State of Feature Management 2022
This year's State of Feature Management report details why, despite uncertain economic conditions, companies are investing in feature management.Â
For this year's report, we again partnered with an independent research firm to survey 1,000 software and IT professionals—more than double the amount we spoke with last year.Â
Among our key findings for 2022 was that 70% of survey respondents say their company leaders view feature management as a mission-critical or high-priority investment. Check out the full report.
Rocketing through re:Invent
This month, our team hit AWS's annual re:Invent conference particularly hard, and was awarded the Most Captivating Presence. We're not going to disagree with that designation, but we also participated in some other talks you can watch right now:
- Building and operating at scale with feature management
- Security incident monitoring, mitigation & metrics using feature flags
- Optimizing price performance with feature management and observability
Find more talks from re:Invent here, and check out our full recap of re:Invent now.
Wrapping up
This post only grazed the amount of updates, events, and conversations we participated in this year. For more, explore our webinars, resources, and blog. We hope you have an excellent holiday season and can't wait to share what's on the horizon for next year.
