Feature Flags

1. The Incident

Three teams, one deploy pipeline, and a marketing department with a countdown clock.

The new wishlist sharing feature launches Tuesday, 9:00 AM: press release, influencer posts, the works. The feature is risky enough to deserve a canary... which takes hours and releases gradually: but marketing needs an instant, at a time, across web and the mobile apps, whose app-store review cycles mean the code must ship days early. Deploy-time and release-time refuse to be the same moment.