Understanding Feature Flags: How This Key Tool Supports More Cohesive Experiences

Brands that deliver relevant customer experiences are much more likely to delight their customers and build brand loyalty. But creating cohesive customer journeys can be tricky, especially when organizational silos separate teams and tools. To succeed, you need collaborative, agile solutions that allow marketing, product, and engineering teams to respond in harmony to changing customer demands.

Enter Braze Feature Flags. These feature toggles let teams quickly create, test, and launch new features in their app or website for a more seamless, streamlined customer experience. So, let’s explore how Feature Flags reduce risk, promote experimentation, and enhance collaboration—all within one easy-to-use interface.

The Benefits of Braze Feature Flags

We'll start by looking at how Feature Flags can help everyone on your customer engagement team deliver exceptional customer experiences on the app and website.

Marketing teams

Though marketers are usually responsible for promoting and driving adoption of new features and experiences, they don’t always have the insight they need to do this easily or accurately. Which users have access to the new feature? Has it been released yet? These questions can haunt marketers who are leery of hitting “send” on a campaign that might not reach the right people with the right information.

Combining Feature Flags with journey orchestration solves this headache for Marketing teams because in Braze, the same audience segmentation and triggers are used to launch a new feature and coordinate the launch with cross-channel messaging. For example, a marketer could create a customer journey that 1) flips on a new feature for a target audience, 2) sends that audience a push notification alerting them of the new feature, and 3) sends that same audience an in-app feedback survey a few days later.

Product teams

Product teams looking to boost experimentation and optimization of their app will benefit from the greater speed, ease, and safety that comes with using Feature Flags. In Braze, Product teams can gradually roll out a new feature by increasing the percentage of users that have access to the feature. They can even target specific segments, like users with the highest engagement, using relevant customer data in Braze to build custom test audiences. Feature rollouts enable teams to capture user feedback and make sure the feature is working as expected before releasing it globally.

In Braze, product teams can also set up Feature Flag experiments to A/B test different variations of a feature. Once they know which variation leads to the highest conversion rate, they can easily flip on the best-performing variation for all users.

Engineering teams

Engineering teams can use Feature Flags to release new features quickly and safely. By releasing new code hidden behind a Feature Flag, your team can turn new features on or off remotely and quickly roll them back at the first sign of a potential bug. Once the bug is fixed, re-releasing the feature is as simple as sliding the Feature Flag rollout bar from 0% to 100%. This bypasses the delay of pushing out new code for every feature or waiting for app store update approval.

Three Feature Flag Use Cases

To see how this works in practice, let’s dive into some common use cases. Here are three ways you can start using Feature Flags to enhance the experience of your app or website.

Target feature rollouts

Braze Feature Flags make it easy to turn on features for specific segments of users, like loyalty members, using all of the rich customer data and audiences you already have in Braze. For example, a travel brand may want to make its rewards program more appealing by offering the ability to book same-day trips exclusively to rewards members. That brand could create a Canvas in Braze that automatically turns the feature on as soon as a customer joins the program, and then triggers a message to new members informing them of the benefit.

Experiment with feature variations

Feature Flags let you experiment and test your hypotheses about new features using the Braze platform’s robust A/B testing capabilities. Teams can easily compare feature variants to see which one drives the most conversions. For instance, an entertainment brand may want to revamp the checkout flow in the app because of declining subscription completions. They could create an experiment campaign with different versions of the checkout flow—order, colors, button sizes, etc.—to test which one yields the highest checkout or subscription rates. Once they see their results, they can quickly roll out the highest converting version by enabling that Feature Flag for all app users.

Coordinate cross-channel messaging

With Feature Flags in Braze, you can seamlessly synchronize messaging with feature rollouts. Using Braze Canvas, teams can orchestrate feature releases and targeted customer communications all in one place so that the messages a customer receives are perfectly aligned with the experience they have in the app or website. For example, if you're launching a new feature to 25% of your app users, you can set up a campaign in Braze that triggers a promotional message right when the feature is launched to only the users that have access to it.

Feature Flag Implementation: How Hard Is It?

That all sounds great, right? You’re likely wondering how much work Feature Flags entail.

Well, they’re super easy to set up. For most use cases, creating a Feature Flag in Braze is as simple as adding a few lines of code to your app or website’s code; the hardest part is actually building the new feature in your backend! Once the Feature Flag code has been added, you can integrate Feature Flags into customer journeys in minutes.

Final Thoughts

Feature Flags are invaluable for engineering, product, and marketing teams. They provide a seamless way to control and monitor feature releases, experiment with new ideas, and synchronize messaging. With Braze Feature Flags, you can speed up deployments, reduce risk, and ultimately provide a more cohesive, relevant experience for customers.

Immobiliare.it, a leader in the EU real estate industry, used Braze Feature Flags to test and launch a new dark mode feature in its app. See how they did it here.