Everything we run ships continuously. The engine behind the apps, the back office our customers build in, the web products around them — code moves to production at the rhythm of engineering: when it's ready, it goes.
Features don't work that way. A feature has a launch: a name, documentation, support people who know it exists, sometimes a price. That's a product decision, with its own calendar, made by people who don't merge code.
So the two acts had to be decoupled, and the thing that decouples them is the humblest object in software: a flag. Deploying code is an engineering act. Releasing a feature is a product decision. On a platform where every app runs on an engine all apps share, you don't get to conflate the two — there is no "just ship it to some users" when a deployment, by construction, reaches everyone.
Weeks in production before existing
There's nothing exotic about a feature flag — any team that ships continuously runs some version of this, and we claim no invention here. But the day-to-day of it is still worth telling, because it's where the two calendars become visible.
