Feature management and experimentation is a broad set of capabilities that spans both software delivery and product management.

With feature management, engineering teams can engage in the practice of progressive delivery wherein features are deployed with flags turned off, tested in production, and then gradually turned on to a progressively larger audience of users until the new feature is completely released. This mechanism can be used for new features, but the most common use case is safely managing continuous updates.

Experimentation has a different purpose. Product managers use experimentation to run A/B tests to compare two similar products in production with KPIs such as engagement, return visits, sales, size of shopping carts, or telemetry on how quickly a user can complete a task.

The combination of feature management and experimentation has been good for product teams. More often than not, however, feature flags are the domain of developers and experimentation is the domain of product and marketing. This is causing a shift in how the two roles are being served.

For feature management, developers are the primary persona and, as such, look to feature management capabilities as an alternative and/or compliment to traditional test-in-production techniques such as blue-green and canary testing. This enables additional mechanisms to release new code into production. The developer persona views a feature management system almost as if it were part of the application architecture or infrastructure.

For experimentation, a growing use case is personalization. The advent of AI is enabling experience designers to deliver experiences that are based on user behavior. The capabilities for A/B testing are there, but they serve a more sophisticated purpose: to tailor the experience to the user’s needs. This is not the realm of developers — it belongs to sophisticated experience designers who work with social science and marketing experts to create experiences that drive product usage and retainment.

This brings us to the future of the Forrester Wave™ covering feature management and experimentation. It straddles two very different personas and two distinctly different use cases. The evolution of these two use cases is occurring rapidly but separately. For feature flags, it’s happening in integrated DevOps platforms and best-of-breed tools. For experimentation, it’s happening in experience design suites. While there are excellent vendor offerings that continue to serve both use cases, by and large, these use cases are being served by separate technology markets.

For these reasons, we are retiring the Forrester Wave for feature management and experimentation. We will continue to cover elements of it in other Wave evaluations. To gain buyer insight when shopping for feature management capabilities, consult our upcoming Wave on DevOps platforms. To gain buyer insight on experimentation capabilities, check out our Wave on experience optimization solutions. To ask me questions about this change, clients can schedule an inquiry or guidance session with me.