Feature Flags Book: Measuring Team Productivity

Fuzzy math over time still shows trends.

— Mike Maughan (podcast, No Stupid Questions)

When your team uses feature flags to work small and build incrementally, what you end up with is a culture of shipping. In this culture, deployments become the heartbeat of the system; and, a bellwether of health. When a team is functioning well, its engineers ship often. And, when a team is having trouble, shipping slows down or becomes a rarity.

Deployments, therefore, act as a metric that can proxy team health and productivity. There's no absolute value here that indicates health; but, deviations from the baseline will reveal truths about the team, its engineers, and their relationship to the rest of the organization.

In 2023, I published a book titled, "Feature Flags: Transform Your Product Development Workflow". This book contains everything that I've learned over the last 7 years about integrating feature flags into my product development. But, a static book can only take you so far. In an effort to make the book more interactive, I've created a series of blog posts—one per chapter—that provide a place in which the readers and I can discuss the content. You can purchase the book and / or read a preview of each chapter on the book's mini-site. Feel free to leave a question or a comment down below.

• Of Outages And Incidents
• The Status Quo
• Feature Flags, An Introduction
• Key Terms And Concepts
• Going Deep On Feature Flag Targeting
• The User Experience (UX) Of Feature Flag Targeting
• Types Of Feature Flags
• Life-Cycle Of A Feature Flag
• Use Cases
• Server-Side vs. Client-Side
• Bridging The Sophistication Gap
• Life Without Automated Testing
• Ownership Boundaries
• The Hidden Cost Of Feature Flags
• Not Everything Can Be Feature Flagged
• Build vs. Buy
• Track Actions, Not Feature Flag State
• Logs, Metrics, And Feature Flags
• Transforming Your Company Culture
• People Like Us Do Things Like This
• Building Inclusive Products
• An Opinionated Guide To Pull Requests (PRs)
• Removing The Cost Of Context Switching
• Measuring Team Productivity
• Increasing Agility With Dynamic Code
• Product Release vs. Marketing Release
• Getting From No To Yes
• What If I Can Only Deploy Every 2 Weeks?
• I Eat, I Sleep, I Feature Flag

Short link: https://bennadel.com/4563