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Have you ever wondered what using Feature Flags at a company looks like? Well, we thought we’d just share how they’re used here. At Harness, we don’t just build products to enable our customers but also to strengthen our own teams. Before even launching Harness Feature Flags, different teams were stress-testing our product for their use-cases and were our true initial customers. To this day, teams like our Customer Success Management (CSM) team use Feature Flags daily for various purposes.
The CSM team provides select customers early access to new features or improvements. This allows them to gather feedback and identify potential issues before rolling out the feature to a broader audience. This also gives other customers confidence that the new features are field-tested when they are generally available (GA).
If a new feature causes unexpected issues or negative customer feedback, the CSM team can quickly roll back to a previous version or disable the problematic feature. This helps to minimize customer disruption and maintain a positive user experience.
The CSM team gradually rolls out new features to a larger user base, starting with a small group of customers. This gives them valuable observability and time to monitor the performance of the feature and make adjustments as needed. They also communicate with customers about the release process and let them know that feature flags are used to gradually roll out new features. Companies may not always be sharing their backend workflows with customers, but when trying to create trust and reliability, it can be key. According to Ruchira Bajaj, a CSM Manager, “Telling the customers that we use Feature Flags to gradually roll out new features gives them confidence in our release process”.
If a customer encounters an issue or has unique requirements, the CSM team can use feature flags to turn specific functionality on or off per customer. Dealing with time sensitivity issues or asks from customers requires flexibility that can always be hard to have foresight on. For Ruchira and her team, “this level of granularity can be helpful for troubleshooting and providing tailored solutions” in order to ensure customer satisfaction.
The CSM team works with several customers who have two instances of Harness. They first enable a new feature on the customer's development/sandbox instance and ensure that there will be no impact on their production deployments. Once the customers have tested the new feature, the CSM team enables it on their production instance of Harness. This allows customers to test new features in a non-production environment before enabling them in production, which helps to minimize the risk of disruption to live customers.
Just as the CSM team takes advantage of them for their own work, here are some of the key benefits of using Harness Feature Flags for your project:
Teams like Ruchira’s and other development teams around Harness count on our product just as much as our customers do to ensure reliable feature releases, among other use cases. If you want to start enabling your team with Harness Feature Flags, get started for free now!
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Learn intelligent software delivery at your own pace. Step-by-step tutorials, videos, and reference docs to help you deliver customer happiness.
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