Hello HN!
I'm working on a prototype (and potential product) for product management software: Think Analytics, Feature Flags, App Config, A/B Testing etc. Think Posthog, LaunchDarkly, Statsig, Firebase AppConfig etc.
Why am I doing this when the market space is already crowded?
Because I've used many of these platforms, and they all seem to lack in ways that I have found to be frustrating, be it UX of the product itself to lack of features.
I'd like to first hear from the community where these platforms fall down.
Some things I think make for a good platform:
- Edge First: Config, Feature Flags, you name it, should be delivered via an edge network (think Cloudflare or Fastly etc.) in near real time.
- Programmatic control: you should be able to programmatically control what identifiers correspond to what features, experiments, holds, layers etc. are applied.
- Environment aware: instead of having to manually setup environments, you should be able to tell the platform what environments you have and how you want features to toggle in kind, e.g. dev vs staging vs prod etc.
- Build time integrations: There is no reason why you shouldn't able able to interpolate some flags at build time from a centrally store, easily. not everything is meant to be done at runtime. This is particularly useful for toggling debug features. You should only have to manage your flags from one central place, and allow the SDK to do the rest.
- Smaller runtime: alot of these clients are very large to ship to customers. For instance, the web SDK for LaunchDarkly clocks 27.5KB minified & gzipped, which adds alot of weight to the application. More logic should be pushed down from the server and clients can and should be lighter.
- Auto Analytics & Tracing: you should be able to tag features from different A/B tests into your logging platforms automatically or with minimal glue. Currently, these platforms aren't even aware of things like error rates unless you (often in duplicate) log them to the platform, if its supported at all
I'd love to hear from you all about this more however! My experience so far is that there is still alot of room for innovation here around execution and ease of use.
