Barysiuk: Independent feature flag rollouts at scale create a customer mess
Serge Barysiuk · How PandaDoc Uses CI to Manage 800 Product Updates Per Month on Path To $100m+ ARR · Dec 12, 2023 · at 13:39
This episode carries Serge Barysiuk's own address, with nobody on the show putting questions to them. It still counts as said, and it is kept out of every score on their page.
PandaDoc CTO Sergey Barysiuk discusses the organizational challenges of continuous deployment and feature flagging at scale.
0:00 / 0:15exact quote · 16.0s
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“When you hit scale, and when you have four teams working on the different things in the different parts of the application, launching this to the users, and 300 feature tags, what it creates a big mess, which you put on your customers.”
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More from Serge Barysiuk
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“Most of the problems you see, they lie between the implementation and review”
Barysiuk: Continuous delivery yields zero learning if customers cannot use intermediate updates
“When you think about the feature, you're thinking about this end stage, and you can do continuous integration, continuous delivery all day long, but if in the middle of this process your customers can't use it, you're not learning anything. If you're waiting, …”
Barysiuk: Feature launches fail unless sales and customer success are enabled
“And so we launch this and that feature flag to 100%. It's done, but it's not. And the teams don't know about this. They can sell it. They don't know, like, how it works and all those things. So this is very important to kind of, like, close the loop and Capita…”
Barysiuk: PandaDoc maintains roughly 300 feature flags at different rollout stages
“So the PandaDoc, we probably right now have roughly 300 feature flags, like, ah, in the different stages, some of them they're rolled out completely, some of them they're like still, maybe like one, two percent, but this is how it works.”