A definitive guide to releasing your best software
Farewell to outages, midnight releases, and customer churn
![A definitive guide to releasing your best software](https://images.prismic.io/launchdarkly/0ab94fbd-16c0-4777-a19b-ab30e2d3f00a_24_02_A%20definitive%20guide%20to%20releasing%20your%20best%20software.png?ixlib=gatsbyFP&auto=compress%2Cformat&fit=max&w=729&h=868)
Introduction
Software is ubiquitous. It’s in our cars, bank accounts, healthcare, infrastructure—virtually everything we encounter in modern life. Market survival demands that every company, to some extent, become a software company. A global study found that roughly 70% of “top economic performers” differentiate themselves from competitors through software.[1]
Unfortunately, building and delivering great software is hard. Extremely hard.
- Great software is shipped quickly with confidence. But many development teams release infrequently. And due to fear, they only release at midnight or on weekends.
- Great software works. But outages afflict many organizations.
- Great software delights users with personalized experiences. But many teams indiscriminately ship the same generic offering to their entire audience (hardly an “experience”).
- Great software improves and has a material impact on the business. But many teams lack a scalable way to run the experiments needed to inform such improvements.
In this guide, we’ll examine four major barriers to building your best software, how to overcome them with a feature management platform like LaunchDarkly, and how other top organizations have thus triumphed. Moreover, we’ll explain some of the difficulties of building feature management capabilities in-house.
--
[1] “Three new mandates for capturing a digital transformation’s full value,” McKinsey Digital: June, 2022.