Feature Flagging Is Not Just For Features: How To Reduce The Risk and Cost of Migration and Change

Successful technology migrations are dangerous when the system architecture is complex, convoluted, integrated, and highly intertwined. These are the conditions where making even small changes can have catastrophic consequences because dependencies are not entirely known, and problems cascade through the entire system.

Furthermore, these conditions lead to the loss of freedom of action — teams can no longer independently make changes without vast amounts of communication, coordination, consensus, and approvals.

On the other hand, when architectures are more decoupled, technology migrations become safer — small changes can be independently developed and delivered to customers quickly, safely, and more easily. Many technologies and tools can assist and help us better prepare and control how migrations turn out overall.

Just as continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) enable an important technical practice, feature management enables another distinct and important architectural practice, which LaunchDarkly brought to the masses — which everyone should be using. It helps teams deliver more value, but also enables work to be fun for everyone in the technology value stream.

In this presentation, I'll present some of the top learnings from my 25 years studying high-performing technology organizations, and the insights I've gained on how important architectures are from my upcoming book, "Wiring the Winning Organization: Unleashing Our Collective Greatness Through Simplification, Slowification, and Amplification," co-authored with Dr. Steven Spear.