How to Ship Faster with Feature Flags: Insights from Unleash

Описание: Still freezing code before Black Friday and hoping nothing breaks? Feature flags can help you ship smaller, safer changes continuously—without the “big bang” risk or painful rollbacks.

Cory O’Daniel talks with Unleash VP of Marketing Michael Ferranti about how modern teams use flags as a core delivery primitive alongside CI/CD and trunk-based development. They dig into kill switches for instant mitigation, progressive rollouts tied to real metrics, and why homegrown “if-statement” systems turn into hidden platforms you didn’t mean to build. They also cover the rising volume of AI‑assisted code and how flags provide the control layer to move faster while protecting reliability.

What you’ll learn:
How feature flags reduce risk for high-stakes periods like Black Friday by avoiding code freezes
When to replace staging queues with progressive delivery and experiment-driven rollouts
Practical uses: kill switches, trunk-based development, targeting, and cleanup strategies to manage flag debt
Build vs. buy: why DIY flag systems become costly and how Unleash’s open source and on-prem options fit regulated or air‑gapped needs
Using business, engineering, and customer signals to automate safe ramp-ups and ramp-backs
Why AI increases code throughput, how it affects reliability, and how flags create the safety rails for agentic workflows

Guest: Michael Ferranti, VP of Marketing at Unleash
Michael Ferranti has held leadership roles at Teleport, Portworx, ClusterHQ, and Rackspace Technology, with a focus on go-to-market strategy in open-source and enterprise software. At Teleport he focused on shifting from legacy security models to developer-first, identity-driven access. At Portworx, he was building new GTM strategies for Kubernetes-native storage when everyone was still figuring out containers, and he helped scale the company from under $500K in revenue to a $370M acquisition by Pure Storage. His work has centered on supporting engineering leaders in delivering features, scaling infrastructure, and improving security without adding unnecessary blockers. Michael has spoken at industry events like KubeCon and theCUBE, sharing insights on platform org design, category creation, and growing open-source adoption.
Michael Ferranti, LinkedIn 👉   / ferrantim  
Unleash, website 👉 https://www.getunleash.io/
Unleash, GitHub 👉 https://github.com/Unleash/unleash
Unleash, LinkedIn 👉   / getunleash  
Unleash, X 👉   / getunleash  
Unleash, Slack 👉 https://join.slack.com/t/unleash-comm...
Unleash, YouTube 👉    / @getunleash  
UnleashCon 2025 👉    • UnleashCon 2025 - Welcome Keynote: Ivar Os...  

#platformengineering #featureflags #production #devops #developers

Links to interesting things from this episode:
React 👉 https://react.dev/
Bitbucket 👉 https://bitbucket.org/
LaunchDarkly 👉 https://launchdarkly.com/
ServiceNow 👉 https://www.servicenow.com/
CockroachDB 👉 https://www.cockroachlabs.com/
Red Hat OpenShift 👉 https://www.redhat.com/en/technologie...
State of DevOps Report (DORA) 👉 https://cloud.google.com/devops/state...
"How to Win Friends & Influence People" 👉https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friend...
Grafana 👉 https://grafana.com/

REMINDER* - Apollo GraphQL has kindly offered us a few free passes to join them at the GraphQL Summit in San Francisco, October 6-8, 2025. If you are interested in going, the code is: PodcastSummit25

Chapters
0:00 Why feature flags beat code freezes
1:07 Michael’s journey and love for developer tools
2:31 DevOps friction and escaping staging queues
4:52 Beyond UI: flags for backends and reliability
6:40 The outage lesson: ship with flags, avoid big blasts
9:08 DIY flags: when “just an if” becomes a platform
15:27 UnleashCon: platform teams, audits, and automation
18:57 Black Friday without freezes: safer, smaller changes
23:05 Persuading leadership with risk and ROI
27:42 DORA metrics and shipping with confidence
31:28 AI code velocity and runtime control
36:57 Trust, reviews, and cleaning up flag debt
42:19 Getting started with Unleash and resources