In the course of five years, the concept of “progressive delivery” using feature flags has gone from a nice to have concept used by forward looking companies like Netflix and Uber, to a must-have capability to stay mainstream. Now, even regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and government are beginning to adopt this method of safer delivery with changes made directly in production behind a flag.

In the near future, all features will be created behind a feature flag, and this method will become an industry standard across development teams, as common as any other principles within DevOps today. The benefits of risk mitigation and agility to pivot to customer needs are simply too big to ignore, and companies that do not standardize progressive delivery in their development will begin to fall behind to those that do.

But beyond progressive delivery, what organizational shift will feature flags drive next? The “democratization” of feature control across an organization outside of development, and a renewed executive focus and company obsession with the effectiveness and ROI of new features, called “feature management.”

Attendees of this talk will come away with the rationale of why it is a question of “when,” not “if” all companies will begin to deliver software progressively and get an understanding of why “feature management” will be the next major focus for companies within the realm of software development.