Heavybit Welcomes New Member: LaunchDarkly

Earlier this week, Heavybit welcomed its newest member company — LaunchDarkly

LaunchDarkly enables SaaS and eCommerce companies to take control of feature launches. Using feature flags as a service, product managers, marketers and developers can tune who sees how their features perform and measure how features increase signups, engagement, retention and revenue. The company offers A/B testing support for real features like registration flows and recommendation engines while also offering PM’s and engineering teams feature controls including the ability to switch features on and off from an easy dashboard. For more info check out launchdarkly.com or read how the company works with customers like Flite.

Meet the Founders

Edith Harbaugh, CEO and Co-Founder @edith_h | LinkedIn
Edith Harbaugh is the CEO and Cofounder of LaunchDarkly. Previous to this she was TripIt Product Director where she led product strategy, analytics and sales — growing subscription revenue from $1M to $5M+ while leading a team of 14. In the past she’s managed product at PlantSense and Monster Worldwide Inc. where she significantly moved the needle on her products revenue (15% year over year for Monster) through customer development, identifying key metrics and relentlessly optimizing. From her engineering work at Epicentric, she has several patents on portal deployment. She has a BS Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, where she and her co-founder met as undergraduates. Edith is an ultra marathoner, because let’s face it, regular marathons just aren’t long enough.

John Kodumal, CTO and Co-Founder @jkodumal| LinkedIn
John Kodumal is the CTO and Cofounder of LaunchDarkly. Previous to this he was a Development Manager at Atlassian where he ran the engineering team for the Atlassian Marketplace. On the Marketplace team, he kept developer processes cutting edge– from evangelizing functional programming to optimizing the company’s continuous deployment process. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley following research on advanced static analysis techniques and has been described by several Twitter engineers as being “deep in neck-beard territory.” He disputes this claim, noting that he is incapable of growing facial hair.

Why We’re Excited

LaunchDarkly’s platform and APIs let developers separate code deploys from feature releases allowing product owners the ability to better manage the entire feature lifecycle. Developers launch new features to small cohorts of users ensuring reliable and quick launches. Developers can also use LaunchDarkly to personalize the user experience (eg. by pricing tier, chronology or usage) and optimize feature bundles. Finally developers can use LaunchDarkly to understand what features are unpopular or underutilized and gracefully sunset them.

Previously this kind of fine-grained feature control was only possible for large companies (eg. Netflix and Facebook) with significant engineering investment into feature management. By pulling business logic out of code and displaying it in easy-to-use dashboards, LaunchDarkly offers sophisticated feature control to every developer and product manager interested in those insights. For more info visit launchdarkly.com