Cost savings shouldn’t come at the expense of getting our jobs done. When resources are tight and your team can’t afford downtime, feature management is a lifesaver and your frugal best friend.
Lean on feature flags with intuitive data attribution, so you can have visibility into what’s working and worth the investment. Know the impact of everything you release with measurement and learning to direct a healthy bottom line.
Take a deep breath like your smartwatch suggests and stay positive. Seriously, things are going to be okay. It’s just another day in an ongoing business cycle, where you will continue to make smart and thrifty software decisions. If you embrace the best practices of feature management, you’ll be on the right track to gain cost efficiencies in the following four ways.
1. Ignite Productivity With Existing Resources
When organizations tighten the belt, you feel the pinch. That pain trickles down to every department –– software engineering included. Although you’re being pushed to move faster than the rapidly changing times, you don’t have the luxury to hire more resources to help. Proverbially speaking: your hands are tied, and you need them to tread water, pronto.
Feature management and experimentation solutions empower teams to do more with less, and that saves money. All it takes is one engineer and about 15 minutes of code to create a feature flag that can expose a small subset of users to new releases. By attaching insightful data to feature flags, engineers quickly know what works, allowing small teams to release faster and more frequently. There’s also a substantial reduction in risk associated with the reliability of feature flagging. With fewer breaks, outages, and rollbacks, there’s less unplanned work to throw a wrench in your well-oiled machine of productivity. You know, the things that slow you down and cost you money in the long run.
The increase of pace you unlock with feature management isn’t incremental. Some companies have reported accelerating their software delivery up to 50 times faster. That’s like untying the hands behind your back and trading them in for a turbocharged engine. Take a turn for the better toward an onramp of internal cost efficiencies.
_ We went from deploying 2-3 times a day to production to 64 times a day. _
-Engineering Manager at Flagship 2022
** 2. Fix User Issues Before They Become Money Pits**
One problematic feature can create a costly ripple effect, and locating the source of the issue isn’t always a breeze. Without a quick triage and response, things break, sites go down, transactions are lost, and customer service nightmares soon follow. Once you finally eat the cost of repairs, the cost of downtime comes. That’s not an easy bill to digest either.
_ 44% of enterprises indicate that hourly downtime costs *exceed $1–$5 million. * _
Feature management and experimentation tools identify and solve end-user issues before companies rack up the price of repair and downtime. With metrics and real-time alerts attached to feature flags, DevOps teams can quickly pinpoint the cause and location of usability and performance issues. Then, it’s as easy as shutting off problem-causing features like a faucet. Might as well tighten up that drain of technical debt.
_ Prior to using Split, we would see a 20%-40% increase in the volume of support cases, issues, and questions during the first two weeks of a code release. With Split, that has been drastically reduced and basically minimized to zero incidents. _
-Software Team at Adobe Workfront
3. Avoid Costly Turnover and Recruitment
Agile cultures don’t just exceed their performance standards. They become digital innovation leaders, and their employees want to stick around. The inverse is costly. This includes higher turnover, increased attrition rates, more recruitment, and high-dollar training.
_ The average voluntary turnover rate for developers is 25%. _
Feature management provides a better product engineering experience with quick, safe, and easy-to-control feature flags. Teams freed from tedious feature changes can accelerate software delivery with better outcomes and less worry. As a result, there’s lower turnover, more retention, and tangible savings on hiring costs.
There’s no better time to put a stop to revolving doors. Establish an environment where your best employees want to stay, grow, and put out a welcome mat for the next generation of top talent. The right feature management solution can even elevate company culture. After all, the best engineers don’t want to be releasing features in the middle of the night. They want to be solving big-picture challenges and driving impactful results.
As a release manager, I would start the release cycle at 8:30 a.m. and wouldn’t be done until midnight. We would call it ‘pain of our release’. Now [that we’re using feature flags] releases are 30 minutes and we’re done.
-Engineering Manager at Financial Institution
The best organizations celebrate their employees as if they were their most valuable assets. Feature management only helps ensure that value is felt.
4. Never Pay the Price of Homegrown Feature Flags** **
Companies can choose to save on subscription fees and develop their own feature flag solutions. Like any do-it-yourself method, it doesn’t necessarily save money in the long run. Homegrown feature flags take time to build and implement—that’s $$$. Plus, these solutions aren’t as accurate, effective, or safe.
Proceed with caution. Companies that build their own feature flag solution often face outages so frequently that their internal teams forego A/B testing. They don’t want to risk breaking things.
If you’re considering a feature management and experimentation solution, look for a platform that attributes data to every feature flag. Also, ask about the SDKs. Are they unique to the software, or are they from a third party? The best feature flag SDKs are proprietary and operate locally within your apps to react to user decisions in real-time. This enables the most accurate, clear, and private data.
We can only think of one feature management and experimentation platform that can do all of these things. But this isn’t meant to be self-promotion. 
A Small Investment Saves You Big: Sigh of Relief
Today is not the moment to slow down your feature releases. Today is your time to shine. Launch more features with speed and safety working together in harmony. Split is a feature management and experimentation platform that can help you improve productivity, decrease turnover, and nearly eliminate downtime.
A software license alone doesn’t accelerate software innovation. Split includes a customer success team to train, onboard, implement, and ensure your team follows best practices. Plus, there isn’t a “surprise” $3K onboarding session that follows (after you’re left unsure how to “optimize” your optimization software).
Sure there’s a small cost associated with starting up the platform, but the return on investment is exponentially worth it. Especially when Split can help you release features up to 50X faster. Propel your team toward a culture of experimentation and continuous delivery while gaining cost efficiency in the process. Request a Split demo today. Or if you’re feeling hands-on, start a free trialinstead.
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