Most companies treat feature flags as temporary on/off switches for releases, not permanent controls for managing who gets what features. The gap comes down to culture: flag tools are built for developers, but entitlements are a business problem about pricing and packaging that product managers need to control.
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Why has there been that disconnect between what a feature flag could be when extended into the entitlement use case?
You know, based on my experience, it's largely, sometimes it's hard to break out of that, what you're used to in a sense. When I talk to a lot of companies and I can do all kinds of different kinds of feature flags and I can have all kinds of targeting, it's like there's often a mindset of feature flag is either just on or off for everybody, like it's true or false, it's just pure Boolean, right? And so it's hard to kind of think about, number one, you typically think about feature flags as being temporary. In this case, they're not temporary, they're permanent part of your application infrastructure, right? So you have to kind of change your mindset about how you use them in that way. You end up building feature flags that are not kind of your typical like, oh hey, this feature is released. It's like I have to get into the targeting piece, which I've noticed a lot of companies struggle to get into using targeting beyond just, oh, I'm going to target this environment or things like that. They tend not to think about it in terms of all the capabilities that that opens up when you are actually using that in your production application. And so I just feel like, yes, companies are moving to, have actually started to adopt feature flags en masse, right? You talk to most developers, on some level or another, using feature flags. They may not be using a feature management system, which will limit their ability to do this, because most homegrown systems aren't going to be able to do that kind of targeting. Number one, but then, you know, also like they haven't gotten past, like I wrote an article ages ago about stages of feature flag adoption, right? And haven't gotten past like stage 2 or something where it's like, I'm just using feature flags for release. I haven't really gotten past thinking like, whoa, what all of a sudden targeting opens up like that these don't have to be temporary that we can manage. I can give like, say, you know, a product manager the ability to create beta groups for beta features and say, you know, work with customers and say, oh, you know, you suddenly get access to these beta features and I'm going to manage it that way. You know, and those kind of things really haven't entered their mind yet. And I think partly also because it's a developer tool and we're talking about entitlements as a business problem. It's not a developer problem, like in the sense of like, you know, they'll build it whatever they need to build, right? Like, they're not thinking about the pricing and packaging and, and, and the kind of complexity that comes with being able to, like, needing to make changes to that, or who should be making changes, right? Like, it's— so I think that's the other piece of it as well.
