Trajectory 2021: Day Two Recap

The first day of our annual conference, Trajectory, was fantastic, kicking off with an inspiring keynote from Edith Harbaugh, our co-founder and CEO. 

We had an equally remarkable start to our second day of Trajectory. John Kodumal, co-founder and CTO of LaunchDarkly, began with a keynote featuring customer stories that highlighted the four key principles of feature management at scale: a developer-first approach, risk-free automation, full-feature lifecycle, and uncompromising performance at scale. 

John’s entire keynote set the tone for what to expect in the rest of the day’s talks: regardless of what type of organization you are—traditional enterprise digitally transforming or born on the cloud, for instance—you can leverage LaunchDarkly at any stage in your feature management journey. 

And the second day of Trajectory really brought into perspective why feature management is integral to your digital transformation efforts. Although it was difficult to pick out my favorite talks from day two, I will highlight the top three in my eyes:

Fireside chat series

This particular fireside chat was hosted by Edith and focused on some key industry leaders in feature management: Michael McKay, principal SW engineer from NCR; Ravi Upad, director B2B e-commerce engineering & engineering platform at Advance Auto Parts; and Chase Brammer, CTO of iFIT. 

Edith sat down with each leader to understand more about the benefits they saw after leveraging LaunchDarkly. The resounding theme was that managing code at scale is much easier when using our platform.

Michael did a fantastic job talking through the modernization project that was started at NCR about three years ago. Some big parts of this shift were moving from monolithic to microservices, and then transitioning to the cloud. His main point was well taken: that the entire concept of digital transformation is a journey, and that each one is somewhat unique to the organization. 

Michael also talked about his first use case leveraging LaunchDarkly, which was at IBM. The main use for IBM was using LaunchDarkly for code deployments. The last two years at IBM, the company finally started leveraging LaunchDarkly for how it is meant to be used, to roll out more features! Michael put it best when he said, “No one had to lose sleep over releases.” Here it is folks, we make releases boring and Michael confirmed this. 

Edith then continued her fireside chat with Ravi from Advance Auto Parts. Ravi detailed the digital transformation journey for Advance Auto Parts and how the company was able to centralize LaunchDarkly. The Center of Excellence (COE) was key to building out a successful model and framework as the company explored the best way to leverage feature management amongst other tools.

Ravi got into details about how LaunchDarkly has substantially increased the velocity of releases at Advance Auto Parts, and states that decoupling their legacy stack from their modern stack was key to their success in moving faster. LaunchDarkly was also critical to the release of the Advance Auto Parts mobile app, which became a huge revenue generator during COVID. 

One of the most eye-opening chats was with Chase, CTO at iFit, which primarily leverages LaunchDarkly to test and validate features with their customers. Putting things behind feature flags and doing beta groups with 10% rollouts helps iFit get feedback quickly. A/B testing with feature flags also helps iFit product teams with their ongoing retention efforts. The most surprising use case of LaunchDarkly for iFit was when the Amazon Kinesis outage happened in 2020. LaunchDarkly quickly became an incident management platform that helped iFit through the outage. 

iFit relies heavily on Kinesis for some features, and this outage lasted for 8-12 hours. So instead of iFit customers staring at a blank screen or an error page, iFit toggled off particular features so customers were not affected by the outage. Leveraging LaunchDarkly for incident management was a sigh of relief for iFit during this incident. 

A Tale of Three Digital Transformations

In continuing on with the digital transformation success stories, one of my favorite talks at Trajectory was “A Tale of Three Digital Transformations,” by Sarah Lands Ramrup, digital marketing analytics lead at Nestle Purina. Sarah recommended LaunchDarkly to Petfinder and Just Right, given her previous experience and successes with LaunchDarkly at her former company. Although the two groups had very different focuses with LaunchDarkly, both were able to see how powerful the platform is for their specific use cases. Petfinder’s focus with LaunchDarkly was to further their modernization journey so pet seekers can easily find their pets. On the software side, Petfinder was focused on progressive delivery, bonded-pair features, and experimentation. Sarah then details how Just Right—a personalized pet food part of Nestle Purina—leverages LaunchDarkly to showcase digital ads in various places to grow their consumer base. As a long-time user and champion of LaunchDarkly, Sarah loves how LaunchDarkly is a truly collaborative tool. LaunchDarkly is able to bring together development, product, and analytics teams into one platform. 

Building LaunchDarkly at Scale with Self Service

In working with other healthcare companies leveraging LaunchDarkly, everything Nicholas said hits home. The way Cigna teams leverage Terraform, Ansible, GitLab, ServiceNow and LaunchDarkly is very relatable to so many others in the Healthcare industry. The challenges with scaling, automating, and growing key tools were so real. To wrap up, Nicholas hit home on why proof of technology (POTs) is absolutely worth doing in conjunction to (continuously) refactoring your environment. 

Scalability of your product outside of your organization is something that absolutely needs to be considered when bringing in LaunchDarkly and other tools for a self-service environment. 

In summary, one of the themes for the second day of Trajectory was that digital transformation works in any industry and really at any time in the modernization journey. 

Did you miss Trajectory this year? Fear not, we’ve recorded the talks so you can watch them at your own pace.