Parachute for the Rocketship: Avoiding major pitfalls of Controlled Rollouts

Learn how controlled rollouts with feature flags helps teams reduce risk, enable experimentation, and move faster.

Ryan Vila, former Principal Systems Engineer, Digital Performance at Soasta, dives head first into “safe launch.” This is the new methodology behind feature releases at companies like Netflix, Facebook, and LinkedIn. In this presentation, Ryan shares his insights on how and why these companies are focused on controlled rollouts of features. By targeting features to subsets of customers, this enables more testing in production. Utilizing experimentation in trunk- or branch-based development to remove common release blockers.

The presentation includes:

• Understanding Feature Flags to enable Safe Launch
• Understanding how Experimentation builds on Feature Flags
• Share experiences from other organizations on the gains they’ve realized from utilizing Feature Flags and Experimentation

Ryan’s current passion is around user analytics and in particular the utilization of data to drive better customer experience and engagement. Modern development organizations need ways to evaluate customer experience and impact at a feature-by-feature level to have quantitative data-driven approach to how they iterate and improve on their applications.