Vida Health transformed its software delivery process by adopting Harness feature management for phased rollouts and production testing, moving from manual in-house feature toggling to automated experimentation. The company increased mobile app releases from monthly to weekly with 30% more features per release, while automated rollback capabilities and real-time monitoring minimized risk. Data scientists were freed from experiment setup overhead to focus on innovation.
The Challenge
Manual rollouts hampering agility
Vida Health relied on an in-house feature flagging solution that involved manually toggling features through a database. While this method provided basic functionality, it lacked the scalability, randomization, and automation needed to support Vida’s growing user base and rapid delivery goals.
Key issues included:
- Risky manual processes for enabling features
- A time-intensive setup for each feature rollout
- Limited ability to run consistent, large-scale experiments
Vida needed a scalable solution to support a faster release cadence, minimize errors, and foster a culture of experimentation.
The Solution
Adopting Split for feature management and experimentation
Vida partnered with Split to overcome the limitations of their in-house system. With Split, they gained:
- Phased Rollouts with Confidence: Using feature flags, Vida could deploy new features in production but only enable them for select user groups. This approach allowed for real-world testing and the ability to roll back instantly if issues arose.
- Streamlined Experimentation: Split’s robust experimentation tools standardized metrics and processes, saving time and ensuring consistent results across tests.
- Improved Collaboration: Split’s integration with Slack enabled engineering and product teams to track and collaborate on feature rollouts seamlessly.
Testing in production
Vida leveraged Split to test new mobile app versions in live production environments. Engineers could:
- Deploy new builds to app stores with hidden features for internal testing
- Validate onboarding flows with test accounts
- Confidently monitor code stability while ensuring smooth rollouts for weekly releases
Iterative feature development
Vida used Split’s experimentation capabilities to refine features through rapid feedback loops. If initial tests showed suboptimal results, teams iterated on the functionality and retested until it met user needs.
Results
From monthly to weekly deployments
Vida Health achieved transformative results with Split:
- Accelerated Release Cadence: Increased mobile app releases from one per month to one per week
- Higher Feature Throughput: Delivered 30% more features per release by running tests in production and rolling back changes if needed
- Standardized Experimentation: Reduced experiment setup time from one week to instantaneous, allowing data scientists to focus on building new therapeutic models
- Increased Confidence: Phased rollouts and production monitoring ensured stable releases, minimizing risks and errors
“Split has become an integral part of our process, enabling us to meet aggressive release goals with confidence.” – Russell Melick, Vida Health Engineering Manager
The Future
Expanding the culture of experimentation
With Split, Vida Health is fully embracing experimentation as a core aspect of its development process. The engineering and product teams continue to refine features, test hypotheses, and innovate at an accelerated pace.As Russell Melick, Vida Health’s Engineering Manager, noted:
“Split has allowed Vida to test our mobile application in a way we wouldn’t be able to do otherwise.”
