Jul 25, 2025
Fighting Fires with Feature Flags
Introduction It was Friday afternoon on the last sprint of the quarter. After months of stakeholder meetings, demos, experimentation, and testing, we deployed at 4:00 PM. By 4:05, we wished we hadn’t. An unhandled edge case in a last-minute revision sparked an hours-long production fire that affected promotional payment processing, costing the company tens of thousands of dollars in lost sales from frustrated customers.