Confidence In Economic Storms (and Other Stressful Metaphors)

As far as we know, it's just offshore. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, alerted the business community to it. "Brace yourself for an economic hurricane," he said. The anxiety continues to ripple across markets faster than waves in a backyard pool. Which begs the question: What's next? What do we do? How do we protect our companies, our customers, and the promise of accelerated software delivery?

With so many unknowns on the horizon, there isn't an easy answer. Interest rates and inflation continue to rise. Supply chains tighten. The hurricanes, bears, roller coasters, and all the other market metaphors that nag us during times like these are emerging. We might as well get comfortable with them in case they're here for a while.

Despite the uncertainty, we can continue to propel ourselves toward meaningful progress. The companies that embrace this moment as an opportunity will quickly arise as the next generation of digital leaders. They won't be frozen by indecision. They'll be developing software with speed and reliability. They won't be lying down in fetal positions waiting for the bears to attack. They'll be the first to release better features designed to improve their customers' lives.

A culture of experimentation and continuous delivery can help you reduce risk, accelerate delivery time, and capture value in times of turbulence. At the very least, the following strategies will keep stressful market metaphors from distracting your progress.

Ship Features at Greater Speed, No Matter the Undercurrent

You could spend months preparing for a feature to launch only to watch it sink. Until you're making data-based decisions around the software features you release, you're wasting time and money. In today's changing market conditions, you can't afford this. Embrace the speed and efficiency to move forward fast. Measure the impact of the features you innovate by attaching performance, behavioral, and business data to every feature you release. You'll know right away what works and what doesn't, so you can focus on the features that promote pure business value.

Start with a foundation of value-driven development and empower your product engineering teams to do more. The teams that use feature management and experimentation platforms have increased the speed and frequency of their releases. "We went from 500 deployments per month to 3,000," noted an engineering manager at DataCamp.

No matter where you are in your agile journey, there's still room to put productivity underway. Lean on a feature management and experimentation platform for support.

Despite the Climate, Release With a 100% Chance of Confidence

Hesitation doesn't mix well with today's economic climate. For product engineering teams, it's not only crucial to accelerate release cadence, it cannot sacrifice safety. If you're worried that the rapid release of features might create costly and time-consuming issues, you can mitigate problems before they arise. There are methods to move forward quickly without breaking things. By automatically attributing performance metrics to features you release, insightful data becomes a life-saving alert system, not a last-minute fire drill. Product engineering teams can rely on feature flags to quickly pinpoint and kill problem-causing features, eliminating time-consuming rollbacks.

When sites go down and transactions are lost, companies pay a hefty price. According to Gartner, the average cost is $5,600 per minute of downtime. Feature management and experimentation platforms like Split can shut off performance errors (and that drain of technical debt). According to one B2B software customer, "Prior to using Split, we would see a 20%-40% increase in the volume of support cases, issues, and questions during the first 2 weeks of a code release. With Split that has been drastically reduced and basically minimized to no incidents."

Find confidence by making speed and safety work together. It might clear up a few clouds of uncertainty in the forecast.

Tighten the Belt Without Constricting Workflow

Resource costs are rising, talent is diminishing, and software engineers have serious transformational challenges to solve. If you're still wasting resources to make minor color tweaks to a button border, you'd better take things up a notch on your belt of fiscal responsibility.

There are solutions out there that can save you time and money without relying on your best resources. Dynamic configuration is one of them. From resizing borders to testing new offers, simple feature changes are made easy for more people across your organization. The best part of dynamic configuration is that your engineers maintain control of the source code. Let everyone pitch in and stay productive under resource constraints with this technology. As companies are constantly changing features on the fly to redefine themselves in times of turmoil, constant pivots and tweaks can happen without added resources or stress.

Additionally, you won't wear down your talent on tedious changes. By focusing teams on the big picture challenges, it's rewarding, and they'll want to stick around. According to the 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics Report, the average voluntary turnover rate for a software developer is 25%. Plus, it costs companies as much as $28,548 to $35,685 just to recruit, hire, onboard, and train a new software developer. If you can avoid continually asking a developer to change the hue of a button, do it. Dynamic configurations can help.

Find Stable Ground: Rely on Evidence, Not Opinions.

Theories. Speculation. Unique points of view. When it comes to innovating digital experiences that matter, opinions matter, too. However, boardroom debates often just amplify the opinion of the highest-paid person in the room.

Let evidence enter the equation today. If you're not making decisions based on data-driven insight, you're closing the door on new ideas. And, you're making costly mistakes by building digital experiences on unproven, shaky ground.

Evidence is stability for the digital experiences you innovate. Be sure your foundational principles for releasing effective, impactful features are measured and calculated. Piloted by data-driven certainty, feature management and experimentation platforms can attach real-time insight to every live feature. By knowing how customers react to your features, you can iterate and experiment with your features until they're proven to attract customers, fill shopping carts, and increase revenue.

Adopt the best practices approach to A/B testing with crystal clear evidence, and your culture of experimentation will flourish. Especially with uncertainty on the horizon, decisions shouldn't be based on opinions. Opinions should drive hypotheses to encourage teams to experiment more (and with efficiency). Remember this when progressing through metaphorical tremors, shake-ups, and or earthquakes.

There's a New Mandate for Software Development

These days, it's not just about delivering faster, safer features. It's about experimenting to improve every aspect of the customer experience—each hyper-targeted connection, virtual interaction, authentic engagement, and beyond. As uncertainty continues to fill the atmosphere, don't forget this. Your boldness is needed to break the rules and set the new standard. At the same time, you need to be able to cut costs and stay efficient. It's all possible with an illuminated path forward.

Split's Feature Management & Experimentation Platform helps companies continuously improve and eliminate expenditures with every feature release. It can mitigate your exposure to bugs and end-user errors by identifying issues before they become costly problems. It can empower your existing product engineering teams to do more without burning them out. Finally, Split's speed and ease of use can even improve employee retention and save on hiring costs.

Make meaningful progress a reality in times of uncertainty, and you can become the next digital leader.

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Split gives product development teams the confidence to release features that matter faster. It’s the only feature management and experimentation solution that automatically attributes data-driven insight to every feature that’s released—all while enabling astoundingly easy deployment, profound risk reduction, and better visibility across teams. Split offers more than a platform: It offers partnership. By sticking with customers every step of the way, Split illuminates the path toward continuous improvement and timely innovation. Switch on a trial account, schedule a demo, or contact us for further questions.