World Kinect increases release velocity by 400%

World Kinect [WKC (NYSE)] is a global energy management company offering fulfillment and related services to more than 150,000 customers across the aviation, marine, and ground-based transportation industries, worldwide. We also supply natural gas and power in the United States and Europe along with a growing suite of other sustainability-related products and services.

Before LaunchDarkly

• User targeting took hours to configure
• ~6 disparate in-house feature management solutions (created silos)
• Reliance on long-lived feature branching to separate changes
• High regression testing effort to validate releases

After

• Product Owners self-serve user targeting in minutes
• Increased releases and deployments by 400% (~640 releases/month)
• Increased developer productivity and satisfaction
• Single feature management platform across the enterprise (all in-house solutions decommissioned)
• Unlocked trunk-based development, canary releases, A/B testing, and progressive rollouts

Over the last few years, World Kinect has embarked on a full digital transformation. This meant accelerating their software releases, migrating from cumbersome legacy applications, and improving the overall customer experience. VP of Architecture Adam Setch was tasked with taking on this digital transformation and first looked to focus on the release process.

As Adam began looking at ways to solve their software release approach, it became clear that standardizing feature flags could be the answer they were looking for. However, World Kinect was grappling with a siloed mix of in-house feature flag solutions scattered across teams. And this lack of standardization resulted in inefficiencies during deployment, further hindering the organization's ability to implement changes seamlessly. Adam looked to partner with LaunchDarkly to create a unified solution for managing feature flags.

Before LaunchDarkly, World Kinect had a more manual deployment process, including the reliance on configuration files and database-driven flags. These manual processes introduced bottlenecks and complexities in the Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. The organization found itself grappling with time-consuming and error-prone deployment procedures that hindered the swift integration of new features and updates.

Additionally, the adoption of fragmented stack-specific approaches added another layer of complexity. Different teams utilized technology-specific solutions, leading to disparities across various stacks and inefficiencies that contributed to a lack of cohesion in the overall development process.

As World Kinect began implementing LaunchDarkly, they not only resolved the issue of having to rely on database-driven flags but were also able to adopt trunk-based development. Developers can now continuously deploy changes to the release pipeline without impacting one another. This led to developers reducing their time in pre-production on average by 15%.

World Kinect took its implementation even further by adding first-class integrations with Jira and Slack so that teams could visualize the entire feature flag lifecycle without having to leave the daily tools they love. From the creation of a flag in Jira to monitoring changes in Slack the entire lifecycle of a flag was now on display.

With LaunchDarkly, World Kinect was able to set up specific approval workflows and permissions to give product teams the flexibility to control and align their feature releases to business needs. Now they can get as granular as needed and release features to specific customers in real-time. They can even test user experiences in production environments without having to expose the feature to their customers. For example, If they had a release that was dependent on a user conference they could easily hide the feature and have the business launch the feature to users live during the conference without requiring any engineering efforts.

World Kinect's digital transformation meant not only modernizing their release processes but also migrating from legacy applications. World Kinect’s legacy applications became difficult to maintain and stifled developer productivity. However, as many developers have experienced, migrating platforms can prove to be difficult and negatively impact the user experience. Senior Software Developer Sarah Vargas led her team to use LaunchDarkly to parse out the migration in a phased rollout rather than one singular change that would impact the user experience.

By placing the migration behind a feature flag with LaunchDarkly, World Kinect was able to safely migrate users from the legacy application onto the new application with zero downtime to users and limiting the blast radius to less than 1%.

As World Kinect continued to leverage LaunchDarkly, the focus shifted toward refining user targeting strategies to enhance the overall user experience across both mobile and web applications. The implementation of LaunchDarkly's targeting capabilities allowed World Kinect to swiftly tailor specific aspects of the application for their specific customer segments without the need for time-consuming redeployments.

This newfound agility empowered World Kinect to validate and introduce features directly in a production environment, gradually exposing them to the targeted user group. The ability to seamlessly target users became a game-changer, particularly as highlighted by Principal Front-End Engineer Alejandro Cuba Ruiz, who noted the significant improvement compared to their previous in-house feature flag solutions. He emphasized that, with LaunchDarkly, the cumbersome process of targeting users, which used to take hours, had evolved into an efficient operation where changes could be delivered in milliseconds, all without the need for custom code.

The adoption of LaunchDarkly not only expedited the targeting process but also facilitated progressive rollouts. This strategic approach enabled World Kinect to implement a more real-time UI strategy, revolutionizing its testing and experimentation processes. As Alejandro highlighted, LaunchDarkly became a critical component in how World Kinect precisely targeted and displayed various parts of the user interface, contributing to an agile and responsive development cycle.

Teams are now looking to take LaunchDarkly's robust real-time targeting and begin measuring the impact of each feature. As World Kinect looks to the future, LaunchDarkly’s experimentation platform will be a central piece of their feature experimentation. With it, World Kinect will be able to easily visualize performance experiments and share results with the business—an improvement from their previous cumbersome process that consisted of a scattered feature flagging and experimentation toolset.

World Kinect's adoption of LaunchDarkly has streamlined development processes, enabling targeted releases, controlled rollouts, and enhanced agility. The integration of LaunchDarkly across various products and applications has facilitated modernization efforts and empowered teams to innovate with confidence. The success story at World Kinect serves as a testament to LaunchDarkly's pivotal role in driving digital transformation within the energy industry.