Shift the feedback cycle left with Feature Flags and Cloud Development Environments

Feature Flags are a great tool that helps you decouple code release from feature release. Adopting them across your entire organization will seriously speed up your team.  PMs will no longer have to schedule developer time to roll out features on certain customers or analyze utilization, and developers won't have to get distracted from feature work to do so. Everybody wins. 

This is a major efficiency boon and a great way to enable collaboration across your team. But this only happens once the code has been shipped to prod. What if there was a way to gain the same type of efficiency, even before committing a line of code? 

Cloud Development Environments are one of the newest trends in software development. By shifting from your laptop to the cloud, you have access to a development that looks a lot like production: it includes all your workloads, data, feature flags, and more. 

In this talk, we want to show you how you can combine the Feature Flags and Cloud Development Environments to speed up product development by shifting left the entire feedback cycle. You no longer have to wait for your code to be in staging (or worse production) before your team gets a chance to see the changes live.  A developer will now write code, and share a link to their environment in a JIRA ticket or a Slack channel and everyone in your team (engineers, designers, PMs, business stakeholders) is going to be able to see changes and interact with the changes in real-time, feature flags included.

This new way of collaboration enables you not only to catch any potential deviations early but also helps PMs and others to start their part of the process even earlier, so delivery dates come sooner, delays happen less often, and teams become much more efficient.