"Empower": The Fourth Pillar of Feature Management

Empower is the fourth pillar of feature management that focuses on enabling customer-facing teams to control access to features, services, and products for customers. This approach reduces the burden on engineers and allows customer-facing teams such as Product Management, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Support to promptly deliver software to customers. Empower exemplifies progressive delegation, a core tenet of Progressive Delivery, which involves gradually transferring control of features to the team most responsible for their outcome. Software organizations can use feature management to empower all teams to influence software delivery in areas such as feature entitlements, customer targeting, proof of concepts (POCs) and trials, and sunsetting features. By leveraging feature flags, user targeting, and feature management platforms like LaunchDarkly, companies can improve operational efficiency, increase productivity across all teams, and enhance the overall customer experience.