LaunchDarkly’s Post

Transcript

As engineering leaders, let's be honest, our job isn't just shipping code. It's delivering customer value, growing the business and protecting the business as it grows. When something goes wrong with software, very few say, hey, great job fixing that outage, no. They ask why did it happen in the 1st place? What was the impact? How do we make sure it never happens again? That's why guarded releases are so important today. Now if you're shipping without automated safety controls, you'll one bad release away from a board level conversation you just don't want to have. Our teams are pushing more changes faster than ever. That's the business need. But with every release, we take on risk, customer experience risk, customer trust risk, revenue risk, even career risk. Because when something breaks at scale, we own it. And let's not forget we don't get measured by how many engineers we had in the war room. We get measured on availability, performance and impact to the business. If you're still relying on reactive fixes, that's not a great place to be. So we made a shift. We created automated safety controls with guarded releases. Now our releases don't simply go out. They get observed in real time, and if something dips below configured thresholds, it rolls back automatically before customers even notice. No debate, no delay. And we get insights about what exactly went wrong the moment it did. This isn't just about preventing failures. It's about removing failure as a cost of doing business. It's about protecting our most expensive resource engineering time, from being wasted on problems we can prevent it in the first place. Here's the kicker. When I talk to other engineering leaders, the hesitation isn't is this valuable? It's are we ready to do this now or do we wait? That's where I advise waiting is where you lose money every quarter that you're still running unguarded releases. You're gambling with your engineering velocity, your customer trust, and your bottom line. The sooner you put this in place, the sooner you get back engineering hours you can reduce burnout and ship with confidence. I have seen teams move from reactive firefighting to predictable controlled releases in 1/4. And once you make this shift, you'll never go back. If you're leading an engineering work today, guarded releases should be the baseline for how modern engineering teams operate. We don't let people deploy without observability. We don't let people push without security checks. So why are we still shipping unguarded releases? If you're serious about protecting your engineering investments, card releases should already be in your stack. And if they're not, now is the time. Not next year, Not when we get to it right now.