What is feature management?

Feature flags are if-else statements that decouple code deployments from feature releases, giving you control over which end-users see which features. Developers have used feature toggles for decades. But historically, they've confined their use to simple Boolean flags within one engineering team, platform, and application.

Such an approach, while easy to manage, limits the value of feature flagging. Using multivariate flags across several teams, platforms, and applications, on the other hand, is much harder but yields the greatest rewards. Feature management makes this high-yield approach possible.

Feature management is a new class of software development tools and techniques rooted in feature flags. It provides a holistic framework for feature flag-driven development, A/B testing, and experimentation, enabling teams to use flags on a massive scale across a variety of use cases.

Feature management, or feature flag management, is a key driver of modern development practices such as DevOps, CI/CD, and Progressive Delivery. Teams that employ feature management increase developer productivity, maintain high system performance, and continuously improve the quality of their software.