Speedway Motors Accelerates Innovation and Customer Conversion with Harness Feature Management & Experimentation

Key Takeaway

Before Harness, Speedway Motors deployed new features every two weeks in high-risk, 4 a.m. releases, leading to anxiety, long feedback loops, and extensive troubleshooting. By adopting Harness Feature Management & Experimentation (FME), Speedway transitioned to safe, progressive delivery and data-driven experimentation, allowing developers to deploy features to a small percentage of customers, monitor performance, and scale up safely within minutes. This transformation resulted in a 30% increase in mobile conversions, a 5.5% increase in purchase attribution from search, and multiple deployments per day, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates, reduced downtime, and faster learning cycles, with teams now measuring success by business impact, innovation, and developer confidence.

About Speedway Motors

Founded in 1952, Speedway Motors is a tech-enabled e-commerce and retail company serving racers, rodders, and automotive enthusiasts around the world. The company manages a catalog of over 250,000 products and supports thousands of daily transactions, with a mission to make every step of the journey—from discovery to delivery—fast, reliable, and rewarding.

“At Speedway Motors, we’re not only in the parts business — we’re a tech-enabled e-commerce and retail company serving racers, builders, and enthusiasts worldwide.”
– Andrew Boellstorff, Director of Digital Product & Technology

In today’s digital marketplace, customer expectations for speed, reliability, and seamless experience rival those of any major e-commerce brand. To keep pace, Speedway’s technology and product teams have evolved from traditional releases to a culture of continuous experimentation, powered by Harness.

The Challenge: Every Release Was a Risky Race

High-Stakes Deployments and Limited Visibility

Before Harness, Speedway’s digital team operated on a two-week deployment cadence that often ended in long, unpredictable release nights.

“With a platform our size, deployments were very long and hard. Sometimes we’d be up at 4 a.m., cross our fingers, and hope everything went smoothly,” said Kelly Baer, Agile Delivery Manager. “If something broke, every customer saw it—and rollbacks took hours.”

Every update was a big-bang event that touched the entire system at once, from the product catalog to checkout and shipping. A single misstep could ripple across the site, disrupting orders, frustrating customers, and triggering long days of investigation and recovery.

Slow Feedback, Slower Innovation

The stress wasn’t limited to late-night releases. Long feedback loops meant that a developer could write code early in a sprint and not know if it worked correctly until weeks later. If issues arose, context was lost, rollbacks were painful, and business confidence eroded.

“When it took two weeks to get feedback, anxiety built up not only in our team but across departments,” said Andrew Boellstorff, Director of Digital Product & Technology.

At the same time, product and marketing leaders were eager to test new customer experiences—upsell recommendations, checkout flows, and search algorithms—but lacked a safe way to experiment. The team wanted to move faster, but couldn’t risk breaking production in the process.

A Need for Psychological Safety

The underlying issue was both cultural and technical. Developers were hesitant to take risks because failures were costly and visible.

“When teams don’t feel safe to innovate, they go slower,” said Boellstorff.
Speedway needed a way to decouple releases from risk—creating an environment where teams could learn faster without fearing failure.

The Solution: Progressive Delivery and Controlled Experimentation

Harness Feature Management & Experimentation (FME) gave Speedway the control, confidence, and data it needed to transform how software was delivered and validated.

Safe, Gradual Rollouts

With Harness FME, teams can now roll out new features to a small subset of customers—1 percent, then 5, 10, 20 percent—and monitor for errors or performance changes. If a problem arises, they can toggle a feature off in seconds, protecting 99 percent of customers from any impact.

“Before Harness, a failed deployment meant hours of firefighting. Now, if something looks off, we flip a switch and move on.” said Baer. “Ninety-nine percent of customers never even notice.”

This approach eliminated the “all-or-nothing” anxiety of big releases. Engineers gained confidence to deploy during normal business hours instead of overnight, and leadership gained trust in the reliability of each change.

Harness integrated easily into Speedway’s existing CI/CD pipelines and analytics tools, ensuring developers could manage flags and experiments without disrupting their established workflows. This seamless fit helped accelerate adoption across teams and reduced onboarding friction.

From Gut Feel to Data Confidence

Beyond delivery safety, Harness empowered Speedway to experiment intelligently. Product teams now validate their ideas with real customer behavior, rather than relying on assumptions.

“We all like to trust our gut,” said Derek Stapleton, Software Engineering Lead.
“But Harness FME lets us see what customers actually do. It’s not about opinions—it’s about data.”

Using controlled experiments, Speedway has tested everything from search ranking algorithms to product-page recommendations, uncovering insights that directly improved conversion and revenue.

Continuous Experimentation and Culture Shift

The adoption of Harness FME changed how the entire organization approached innovation. What once required a two-week cycle and late-night releases is now a daily rhythm of deployment and learning.

“We used to have a whiteboard full of sticky notes with experiments we wanted to run,” said Baer. “Now we’re running five to ten experiments per sprint, implementing changes that directly impact the business.”

Harness also introduced psychological safety—developers know they can take calculated risks without jeopardizing uptime or customer trust.

“Our team no longer fears deployment days,” said Boellstorff. “They look forward to them.”

The Results: Faster Feedback, Happier Teams, Measurable Growth

The transformation has been dramatic—both culturally and financially.

Safer, Faster Delivery

• Deployment frequency: from once every two weeks → multiple per day
  
  
• Rollback time: from hours → 20 seconds
  
  
• Release timing: from 4 a.m. fire-drills → safe daytime rollouts
  
  
• Operational control: permanent feature flags now manage critical systems, such as temporarily disabling warehouse operations during severe weather

“The last 4 a.m. deployment was before Harness,” said Boellstorff. “Now, we can deploy anytime with confidence.”

Data-Driven Business Wins

• +30 % increase in mobile conversion through experimentation-driven optimizations
  
  
• +5.5 % increase in purchase attribution from improved search algorithms
  
  
• +4 % increase in total orders placed after product-page redesign
  
  
• Prevented a 2.5 % drop in order volume by disproving a faulty upsell hypothesis
  
  

Harness FME has turned experimentation into a profit driver. Instead of debating ideas, teams test, measure, and scale what works.

“Our team doesn’t measure success by how fast we deliver,” said Boellstorff. “We measure it by business impact—conversion, profitability, and customer experience. Harness helps us focus on outcomes, not outputs.”

Happier, More Confident Developers

By embedding safety and data into every rollout, Speedway reduced developer stress and burnout. Teams report higher confidence, faster decision-making, and better collaboration between engineering, product, and leadership.

“Psychological safety is the difference between fear and confidence,” said Baer. “Harness gave us the freedom to move faster without the fear of breaking things.”

The Broader Impact: Trust and Alignment Across Teams

The benefits extended beyond engineering. Business leaders gained real-time visibility into which experiments drive results, allowing marketing and product to make informed decisions about pricing, promotions, and customer experience. Customer support and operations saw fewer incidents, freeing them to focus on service excellence rather than issue triage.

Harness also fostered stronger alignment across Speedway’s digital organization. Developers, QA, and product owners now share a unified platform for experimentation, feedback, and learning—creating a culture of continuous improvement grounded in data.

Metrics at a Glance

Looking Ahead

Speedway Motors continues to build on its foundation of safe experimentation. The team is exploring ways to integrate Harness’s AI-driven insights to further automate experiment analysis and connect feature rollouts to revenue outcomes in real time.

“Harness has become a key part of our overall strategy,” said Boellstorff. “It increases the velocity of experimentation, strengthens our culture of safety, and helps us deliver better customer experiences every day.”

By pairing its passion for performance with Harness’s platform for progressive delivery, Speedway Motors has redefined what speed means in modern e-commerce—faster, safer, smarter, and always driven by data.

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