Speedway Motors, an automotive parts e-commerce leader, replaced slow high-stakes releases requiring extensive handoffs and late-night deployments with Harness Feature Flags and trunk-based development. Engineers could safely test features in production without impacting customers, and data attribution tied every change to measurable business metrics. The company moved from infrequent, risky deployments to multiple daily releases, reducing team stress and directly driving revenue growth.
The Challenge
Slow, high-stakes releases
Speedway Motors faced significant challenges with their software release process. Deployments were infrequent, happening every two weeks, and required extensive handoffs between product, development, and QA teams. Late-night releases often resulted in emergency hotfixes or rollbacks, adding stress and delaying innovation.
As an e-commerce business, Speedway Motors needed a way to deliver impactful new features at the speed their customers demanded while ensuring stability and minimizing risk.
“We went from a release cadence of every two weeks to multiple times a day. Mistakes will happen, but we know we can recover quickly.” – Andrew Boellstorff, Senior Product Manager
The Solution
Accelerating releases with Split feature flags
To overcome the challenges of slow and risky releases, Speedway Motors partnered with Split to implement a safer, faster, and more data-driven development process. By adopting trunk-based development and using Split’s feature flags, the team could continuously integrate new features, bug fixes, and code changes without the fear of “merge hell” at release time.
Split’s targeting capabilities allowed Speedway Motors to enable features for internal teams first, running automated tests in production without impacting customers. Features could be rolled out gradually and monitored for performance, with feature flags serving as kill switches to instantly disable any problematic changes. This safeguard eliminated the need for emergency hotfixes and minimized the blast radius of potential issues.
Beyond improving release safety, Split’s robust data attribution capabilities empowered Speedway Motors to tie every feature rollout to measurable business metrics. By gradually deploying changes, such as a new checkout process, and monitoring their impact on key performance indicators like conversion rate and order value, the team could make confident, data-backed decisions at every step.
With Split’s tools fostering speed, safety, and a culture of experimentation, Speedway Motors transitioned from infrequent releases to multiple daily deployments, dramatically improving their ability to deliver features that enhance the customer experience and drive business growth.
“We’ve completely eliminated the need for hotfixes because we have the safety system built in to contain the blast radius of any problem that we come across.” – Andrew Boellstorff, Senior Product Manager
Results
Going from a couple deployments monthly to multiple deployments per day
The partnership with Split delivered transformative results:
- Accelerated Deployment Cadence: Speedway Motors moved from infrequent deployments to deploying multiple times per day, enabling faster delivery of customer-facing improvements.
- Eliminated Emergency Fixes: The use of feature flags as kill switches completely eradicated the need for hotfixes.
- Improved Conversion Rates: The new checkout process, safely rolled out with Split, led to a year-over-year increase in conversions, boosting overall profitability.
- Data-Driven Experimentation: With Split, Speedway Motors confidently ran experiments, such as testing reduced shipping fees, to optimize core business metrics while maintaining profitability.
- Cultural Shift: Engineers embraced a culture of experimentation, finding greater satisfaction in seeing their work directly tied to business success.
Future
Fostering a culture of experimentation
Speedway Motors is fully embracing experimentation as a core aspect of its development culture. Engineers now use Split to explore new ideas, measure their impact, and refine the customer experience. As Senior Product Manager Andrew Boellstorff noted, “Split helped us build and foster a culture of experimentation. Our developers are super excited they can make a configuration change, monitor the results, and know they drove real business value for millions of customers.”With Split as their feature management and experimentation platform, Speedway Motors is poised to continue delivering innovative, high-impact solutions at an unprecedented pace.
