From Deployment to Adoption: Why Your Feature Flags Aren’t Enough

Your engineering team is crushing it. You’re deploying code multiple times per day, your CI/CD pipeline is a thing of beauty, and you’ve implemented feature flags across your entire platform. You’re practicing “Progressive Delivery,” right?

Not quite.

If you’re like most organizations, you’ve optimized brilliantly for one-third of the software delivery equation while completely ignoring the other two-thirds. You’ve mastered deployment but haven’t given nearly enough thought to release and adoption.

This isn’t just a semantic distinction—it’s the difference between shipping features and delivering value.

The Three-Stage Reality

Most teams conflate deployment and release, treating them as a single event. But in reality, software delivery involves three distinct stages:

• Deployment: Getting code to production environments 
• Release: Making features available to users
• Adoption: Users successfully incorporating features into their workflows

Your feature flags might excel at managing the first two stages, but they’re not designed to address the third—and that’s where real business value lives.

Why This Matters: The Slack Redesign Disaster

In 2019, Slack released a major UI redesign that perfectly demonstrated this distinction. The deployment was flawless—no downtime, no technical issues. The release was controlled—they used feature flags to gradually expose the new interface. But adoption? That’s where things went sideways.

Users revolted. Not because the new interface was objectively worse, but because Slack had optimized for technical delivery while ignoring the human side of adoption. They had built the right thing technically but delivered it to users who weren’t ready for such a dramatic change to their daily workflow.

Some organizations delayed upgrading for months to maintain productivity. The technical execution was perfect, but the adoption strategy was nonexistent.

The False Promise of “Deploy Fast, Fix Faster”

The modern mantra of “deploy fast, fix faster” works great for technical issues but falls apart when the problem is adoption resistance. You can’t hotfix your way out of users who feel like their familiar workflows have been hijacked.

Consider these scenarios:

• Your analytics dashboard gets a beautiful redesign, but power users can’t find the keyboard shortcuts they’ve memorized.
• You add AI features that early adopters love, but they confuse mainstream users who just want to complete their routine tasks.
• Your mobile app’s navigation gets streamlined, but longtime users feel lost without their familiar button placements.

In each case, the “problem” isn’t technical—it’s human. And rolling back the feature isn’t a solution if some users actually prefer the new experience.

Beyond Feature Flags: Radical Delegation

Progressive Delivery introduces a concept called “radical delegation”—progressively moving control closer to the people most affected by the outcome. Instead of your product team deciding when users should adopt new features, you delegate that decision to the users themselves.

This isn’t just about offering an “opt-in beta” checkbox. It’s about fundamentally rethinking who should control the pace of change.

Examples of radical delegation in action:

Microsoft Outlook offers a “Try the new Outlook” toggle, letting users control when they switch to the redesigned experience. They can test it, revert if needed, and switch permanently when they’re ready.

Adobe Creative Cloud allows users to choose which AI model version to use for different projects. Users working on long-term projects can maintain consistency, while those wanting cutting-edge features can opt into the latest models.

Google Workspace provides separate “Rapid Release” and “Scheduled Release” tracks, acknowledging that different organizations have different change absorption capacities.

The Real Cost of Ignoring Adoption

When you optimize for deployment speed without considering adoption, you create what the upcoming book Progressive Delivery calls “technological jerk“—the jarring experience users feel when change happens too abruptly.

This shows up in your metrics as:

• Features with mysteriously low adoption despite obvious benefits.
• Support ticket spikes after every release.
• Negative app store reviews mentioning “too many changes.”
• User-created workarounds to avoid new functionality.
• Increased churn among previously loyal customers.

The irony is that faster deployment without thoughtful adoption actually slows down your ability to deliver value. You end up spending more time managing user frustration than building new capabilities.

Building Adoption Into Your Delivery Process

So how do you evolve beyond feature flags to true Progressive Delivery? Start by treating adoption as a first-class concern in your delivery process:

1. Separate Your Control Points: Instead of binary on/off feature flags, create granular controls that let different user segments adopt features at different paces. Your early adopters shouldn’t have to wait for your cautious enterprise customers, and vice versa.
2. Measure Adoption, Not Just Usage: Usage tells you if a feature works technically. Adoption tells you if users have successfully integrated it into their workflows. Track metrics like time-to-productivity, workflow completion rates, and user sentiment—not just click-through rates.
3. Design Reversible Experiences: Make it easy for users to step back from new features if they’re not ready. This isn’t just about rollback capabilities—it’s about maintaining user confidence that they can explore new functionality without getting trapped in unfamiliar territory.
4. Create Feedback Loops for Readiness: Build mechanisms to understand when users are ready for change versus when you’re ready to ship change. These are often very different timelines.

The Path Forward

Feature flags were a crucial step in evolving beyond the “big bang” deployment model. But true Progressive Delivery requires us to think beyond technical deployment to human adoption.

The goal isn’t to slow down innovation—it’s to ensure that innovation actually reaches users in a way they can absorb and benefit from. When you nail adoption, you can actually move faster because you’re building on a foundation of user confidence rather than constantly managing resistance.

Your feature flags have solved the hard technical problem of deployment control. Now it’s time to solve the equally important human problem of adoption control.

This post explores concepts from the upcoming book Progressive Delivery: Build The Right Thing For The Right People At The Right Time by James Governor, Kim Harrison, Heidi Waterhouse, and Adam Zimman (IT Revolution Press, November 2025).

- About The Authors

Leah Brown

Managing Editor at IT Revolution working on publishing books and guidance papers for the modern business leader. I also oversee the production of the IT Revolution blog, combining the best of responsible, human-centered content with the assistance of AI tools.

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