Consumers expect their experience with a brand to feel seamless across every interaction, from the messages they receive to the features and functionality they use in connection with an app or website. But creating that feeling of consistency can be tricky, especially when the teams and tools needed to deliver it are siloed or slow.

Teams that embrace collaborative, agile-friendly tools are well-positioned to succeed in creating the types of experiences that keep users coming back for more. One key tool that can make that happen? Feature Flags, which allow product and marketing teams to quickly launch, test, and optimize features on mobile apps and websites. Think of Feature Flags as an ‘on’/’off’ switch for features in a platform: A new feature can be switched on for a particular audience, switched off if a bug is discovered, and rolled out globally when it’s ready for everyone.

Feature Flags in the Customer Journey

When combined with other customer engagement capabilities, Feature Flags become a powerful tool for driving seamless engagement in the product. In Braze, Feature Flags work in tandem with segmentation, cross-channel messaging, and experimentation tools, allowing teams to turn features on or off for specific audiences. With this tool, brands can personalize their product experiences, coordinate messaging campaigns to drive feature awareness and adoption, and run A/B tests to determine the highest-performing version of a feature.

For example, let’s say an on-demand delivery brand just built a new loyalty rewards portal in their app, and it’s ready to launch. In Braze, that organization can use a Feature Flag to enable the rewards portal for all app users in their existing “Loyalty Member” audience segment. Then, the team can send an in-app message to that same segment alerting them that the portal is now available and share benefits of using the portal. Previously, a coordinated feature launch like this might’ve required several teams and several systems. Now, the entire flow is orchestrated in Braze.

How Immobiliare.it Uses Feature Flags for Fast, Coordinated Releases

Immobiliare.it, a leading player in the EU real estate industry, uses Braze Feature Flags to help answer an age-old product question: Are the features they build in their app truly solving their customers’ problems? To find out, the product team used Braze to release a new “Dark Mode” feature in their app and capture user feedback through in-app messaging channels.

Prior to this release, the Immobiliare.it team was using a feature management platform that didn’t allow them to enable features for specific segments of their audience. This made it difficult to understand the impact of new features, since they couldn’t determine what was signal and what was noise. In addition, their former platform required heavy support from their Engineering team, which limited the product team’s agility.

Due to these challenges, the product team was eager to test out Feature Flags in Braze. After all, they already use Braze for audience segmentation and cross-channel messaging, both of which they wanted to incorporate into the Dark Mode release. Plus, it meant that they only needed one person and one platform to launch new features, rather than multiple people managing multiple solutions.

Before investing more time and resources into building out Dark Mode capabilities in the app, the Immobiliare.it team wanted to first validate the feature with a small group of app users. The team also wanted to know if users enjoyed Dark Mode and if it increased app activity. They knew just who to target with the initial release: An audience segment of “very active users during the evening hours,” which they created using the Braze platform.

Immobiliare.it was able to use the new segment to both launch the feature and coordinate relevant launch messages. First, they used a Feature Flag to turn on Dark Mode for app users in that segment. Then, they created and immediately sent an in-app message campaign to communicate the availability of the new feature to that segment. Two weeks later, the team launched an in-app survey, also targeted to that same segment, to collect qualitative feedback directly from users on their experience with Dark Mode. The entire feature launch process was coordinated in one place, saving the Immobiliare.it team time and resources.

Overall, the Dark Mode experiment was a success for the Immobiliare.it team. They eliminated complexity by bringing complementary product and messaging workflows together into a single platform. In fact, Immobiliare noted that the time spent launching and promoting a new feature was reduced by 50%. The ability to use the same audience segment across all steps of the campaign reduced the risk of any inconsistencies between the users who had access to Dark Mode and the users who received the accompanying messages, supporting a more cohesive, valuable experience.

Not only did the team drastically reduce the effort and risk of launching a new feature, they also gained valuable insights directly from their app users. Before using Braze Feature Flags, it took multiple people at least six weeks to analyze product insights. For this campaign, it took only two weeks for a single Product Manager to understand how this new feature solved a customer problem and to decide whether to extend it to the whole user population. Faster insights mean faster iteration, allowing the product team to embrace a more agile approach to innovation.

“With Braze Feature Flags, we were able to reduce campaign development time by 50%. The tool has been instrumental in allowing us to easily coordinate feature releases with customer messaging with a single click and eliminate risks of inconsistency in segment targeting. Our product teams have been able to run with feature flags and collect valuable insights efficiently and independently, enabling us to provide the seamless and personalized experiences to our customers that they have come to expect.”

—Paolo Sabatinelli, Chief Product Officer of Immobiliare.it

Final Thoughts

As Immobiliare.it's campaign shows, Feature Flags aren't just a way to manage product rollouts—they can also be leveraged as part of an overall customer journey to launch new features more quickly, tailor product experiences, run agile experiments, and coordinate launch messaging. Not only does this help teams work more efficiently, but it also provides customers the seamless experiences that they’ve come to expect—a real win-win.

Learn more about how your team can leverage Feature Flags here.