Flags sprint Feb 7 - Feb 21

[dmarticus]

I'll copy this into the main issue on Wednesday

Team Finally Launching A Groundswell SDKs (Flags)

Retro

Onboarding Lucas, finishing hackathon projects, starting work on the Java SDK, sparking customer joy, and finishing new flags

• @haacked – On vacation, the snow looks sick
  • 231 downloads so far of the PostHog Nuget package!
• @havenbarnes
  • Launched remote config flags, monitoring usage
  • Finished encrypted payloads for remote config flags, SDK changes still needed
  • Started new Java SDK derived from posthog-android
• @dmarticus
  • sparked customer joy
  • new flags are ready for real traffic! I wrote a synthetic test bed to verify how they work in both posthog-js and posthog-python and I've confirmed that person targeting works for every scenario. Am going to start rolling out real traffic this week – starting with team 2, and then ideally some percentage of real traffic later in the week

This sprint

Themes: release new flags to production traffic, meaningful progress on Java SDK, continue to spark joy with small features, start working on behavioral cohort targeting

Time off: @haacked 5 days

• @dmarticus

  • Roll out new flags to a meaningful percentage of production traffic
    • start with all traffic for team 2, then do % rollouts
  • Implement quota limiting for new flags
  • Finish non-production-rollout-blocking tasks for new flags
    • All "necessary for release" tasks from here: Feature Flags Rewrite: List of things to get done #22131
  • Deliver RFC for behavioral cohort targeting

• @havenbarnes

  • Launching encrypted-payload remote config flags PR
  • Launching new posthog-java SDK
  • More revs on observability work

• @haacked

  • TBD, will chat with Phil about this

Support

• 2/7-2/14 @dmarticus
• 2/14-1/21 @havenbarnes (Phil to shadow potentially?)

Q1 2025 Objectives

(I'm going to turn these into sub-issues so I don't have to type so much)
✅=finished 🟡=in progress 🔴=won't finish ⚪=not started

🟡 Performance & Reliability

• 🟡 Complete migration of feature flag evaluation traffic from the legacy /decide endpoint to the new /flags endpoint (@dmarticus)
• ⚪ Establish comprehensive monitoring and observability for the feature flag platform (@dmarticus, @havenbarnes)
• ⚪ Enhance Grafana metrics to differentiate between infrastructure failures and logical errors (@dmarticus)
• ⚪ Collaborate with infrastructure team to create infrastructure cost analysis and dependency mapping with Michi (@dmarticus)
• 🟡 Improve observability of the feature flag evaluation process by tying flag evaluation results to the original request context (@havenbarnes)
• ✅ Experiment with sampling request parameters for high-value customers to have better observability for support requests (@havenbarnes)
• ⚪ Implement actionable Sentry alerts in #alerts-feature-flags channel (@havenbarnes)
• ⚪ Integrate PostHog error tracking with new flags endpoint (@dmarticus)
• 🟡 Implement read-only flags (specifics to be defined, see the following RFC) (@havenbarnes)

🟡 Customer-Driven Innovation

• ⚪ Behavioral cohort targeting for flags (RFC here) (@dmarticus)
• 🟡 Feature management (@havenbarnes)
• ⚪ Automatically manage flag staleness (@haacked)
• ⚪ Customer research-driven features (TBD based on the findings of the market research and customer interviews)

⚪ Strategic Research

• Identify and analyze key user segments:

1. Current active users
2. Competitor users
3. Custom solution implementers
4. Potential users unaware of feature flagging

• Conduct customer interviews to identify gaps and growth opportunities
• Document findings and recommendations for product roadmap.
• More context here

🟡 SDK Spike

• 🟡 Evaluate feasibility and tradeoffs around adding feature flags to the Java SDK
• ⚪ Investigate improving the Rust SDK (add feature flag evaluation, implement the suggestions from the open issues etc.)
• 🟡 Research .NET SDK demand + feasibility @haacked
• ⚪ Fix open issues in the Python and Node SDKs: (Python, Node)

🟡 User Experience Improvements

Low-hanging, medium-impact, and largely context-free fruit that can be picked up by any team member during available capacity:

• ⚪ Consolidate boolean and multivariate flag interfaces
• ⚪ Show flag evaluation results more clearly in the flag editor UI
• ⚪ Improve the experience of syncing flags between environments
• 🟡 Anything else from the current feature flag backlog