Principles

We’re on a mission to enable developers to ship the right features as fast as possible. 

‍To achieve our mission, we’re building Bucket based on three product principles:

Frictionless

Developers should spend their time building features and fixing customer issues. Everything else is friction. Feature flagging is a necessary means to an end and we’re making it as frictionless as possible. The best developer tools integrate effortlessly into the developer’s existing workflows, so the developer can stay in the zone and not context switch between systems all of the time.

One of the drawbacks of using flags is that they require code maintenance. For new feature releases, you have to create flags, embed them, manage them - and remove them again for non-gated features. Spending time on flag creation or submitting pull requests to remove a flag is time deducted from addressing customer pains.

We’re giving developers their time back by making the fastest feature flagging tool, so they can focus on building. We’re doing this by automating maintenance tasks and integrating deeply with the existing stack. Whenever management or reporting is needed, we make sure to provide the cleanest user interface possible.

Purpose-built

Typical feature flagging tools try to solve multiple use cases that are very different – from ecommerce to SaaS. While A/B experiments may be relevant for funnel optimization in ecommerce, it’s irrelevant in SaaS where you can’t outsource decisions to a machine. Instead, you have to develop a strong product taste.

To go fast, you need the best tool for the job. The way to design such a tool is to make it purpose-built for a specific use case. For example, in SaaS the company entity and its subscription plan is core so the flagging tool has to be based on this core.

Furthermore, the tool should be opinionated. By understanding the use case, the tool can provide workflows that just work and move tedious tasks into automated background tasks. Opinionated tools also understand good defaults and when to offer flexibility.

We’re building the workflow for seamlessly releasing features and managing them. This means offering a frictionless journey for releasing features - from internal testing, to beta users to General Availability - and for managing feature gating based on subscription plans.

Customer-centric

Sometimes it feels like developers are clocking in at a feature factory. A conveyor belt optimized for output ahead of fixing customer issues and delivering value. Tools and automations have emerged over the past decade to help developers take features from design to release faster than ever. Or to “Done,” as issue trackers call it.

But features aren’t done when they’re deployed. That’s when the customers see them for the first time! It’s the most crucial time in a feature’s lifecycle, and that’s when we drop attention. 

Half of all features fail to have any customer impact in their first iteration. They’re either unnoticed, confusing or insufficient.

Developers are often best suited to address customer issues, but they’re rarely exposed to the feedback or have to jump through multiple systems and custom dashboards to access it.

We’re adding feature adoption and feedback to feature flagging to effortlessly incorporate this into the development process. This enables developers to release a beta feature and rapidly fix customer issues - before releasing to everyone. We’re shortening the feedback loop and providing the context developers need to build the right things faster.