4 posts tagged with "segmentation"

Let's say you've just built a new feature, but it's not ready for a full release just yet. So, you decide to test it with a small group of people.

You can go about it in two ways - deterministic or random. The first way lets you specify people by name, email, company or any other attribute you know about them. The latter uses fancy math and probability to randomly assign users into groups. Let's see how you'd accomplish both using ConfigCat's feature flag services. For context, ConfigCat is a developer-centric feature flag service with unlimited team size, awesome support, and a reasonable price tag.

Picture this: You’ve added a new feature to your software, linked it to a feature flag, and deployed it to production. Now, you’d like to enable this feature for a subset of your users to get their feedback before you take the leap and roll it out to everyone.

But who gets to see this new feature first? How do you choose the first user segment? How do you use feature flag rules to target them?

Good to know: Feature flags let you launch new features and change your software configuration without (re)deploying code.

Let’s look at some typical real-world examples of how you can do canary releases using ConfigCat.

Scenario: You’ve thought up a small change for your app. You write and test the code, and everything looks good. As you’re about to push it into production, you stop and ask yourself, “Will the users like this?”

You start having doubts, that maybe the idea isn’t as good as you previously thought. Still, you continue to have a strong feeling that it’ll make your app better.

One solution to this dilemma is to gradually introduce the change to a portion of users and track its impact on them. This is called A/B testing, and it’s a simple, low-risk way of letting your users pick which variant yields better results.

Separating your customers into distinct segments will help your product in all sorts of ways. It can help you track the usage of your app in a more meaningful and granular way. It can also reveal how specifically different segments behave differently, which will help you prioritize future feature development as well as focus your marketing efforts.