# Engineering Leadership Summit: Edith Harbaugh, CEO and Co-Founder of LaunchDarkly This post is part of our historical archive. It represents the beliefs, actions, products, and services of Code Climate as of its publication date. Today, Code Climate focuses on providing enterprise leaders the software development data, context layer, and playbooks needed to build the AI-native software organization their enterprise needs. Head to codeclimate.com to learn more. _Sep 9, 2020_ _As part of this year’s Engineering Leadership Summit: Virtual Edition, we spoke to Edith Harbaugh, CEO and Co-Founder of LaunchDarkly. She discussed Progressive Delivery and the importance of Cycle Time. Below is an excerpt from the fireside chat portion of Edith’s session, edited for length and clarity._ **Hillary Nussbaum, Content Marketing Manager, Code Climate:** Welcome to the closing session of this year’s Engineering Leadership Summit, featuring a conversation with Edith Harbaugh, CEO and Co-Founder of LaunchDarkly. Edith and I will be talking about continuous delivery, specifically about what she wrote in the foreword of our upcoming book, The Engineering Leader’s Guide to Cycle Time. Let’s jump right in. Edith, do you mind introducing yourself? Tell us a little bit about what you do and how you got to where you are today. **Edith Harbaugh:** Hey, I’m Edith Harbaugh, CEO and Co-Founder of LaunchDarkly, a feature management platform. We have customers all over the world, like Atlassian, BMW, who rely on us to get the right features to the right customer at the right time. And we do this at massive scale — we serve trillions, trillions with a T, of features every day. **Tell me a little bit about what software development and delivery were like when you first started, and how things got to where they are today, and then where LaunchDarkly fits into all that.** So I started back in the ’90s, and I always loved software because it was a way to bring stuff to life, it was a way to create something from scratch and get it out to the world. The way software was built back in the ’90s was very different than it is now, and that was because you had to physically ship software. So you would have a team of engineers at Microsoft, for example, who would work for three years, and they would release it to manufacturing and print all the bits on a bunch of disks, and then ship them out. You would actually go to the store and you would buy a box of software, and then you would sit at your computer and you would feed all those disks into your computer, and that would create Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word. This was pretty cool because then you could use Microsoft Excel, which I still love. It also created a lot of habits around software — when it went to manufacturing, it had to be perfect. Somebody’s going to buy a 25-disk box of Microsoft Word and then install it on their computer, and it better be good because they’re not going to do that every day. They might not even update it every year. **How exactly do you feel that impacted things moving forward? Even as people started to change their delivery model, do you still see holdovers from that today?** The massive sweeping change that happened — and it’s still happening, to be honest — is from packaged software to software as a service in the cloud. I’m looking at my computer right now, it doesn’t even have a slot for disks, it just doesn’t work that way anymore. You get your software from the cloud, virtually. And what this has really changed is that it’s okay to move a little bit faster, because you can change it. The whole idea that we’re going to have Windows 3.7 Service Pack 6 is just gone now, now you can get a release whenever you want. And how that’s changed software is it’s really freeing and liberating in a weird sort of way. Think of the poor engineers of the ’90s, when you only had a three year window to work and then ship. It got very political, it got very hard, because you’re like, “I have to make a guess about what people will want three years from now. If I’m wrong, I won’t have a chance to fix it.” **And where do Continuous Delivery and Progressive Delivery fit into all that? Agile is a step past waterfall, but I would say that Continuous Delivery takes that even a step further. How do you see that all fitting together?** So Continuous Delivery was a step past agile in that it was this idea that instead of doing a release every year or every six months, that you could just release whenever you wanted. Jez Humble and David Farley really popularized this theory with a book called Continuous Delivery, where it’s like, okay, let’s make it so you can release any time you want. The downside to Continuous Delivery, and why we came up with Progressive Delivery, is that it’s terrifying. What I just said about how you can ship 10 times, 50 times an hour — if you’re a big bank or an insurance company, that’s absolutely horrifying. I’ve got customers who are depending on me, and I don’t want that. Even Facebook has moved away. Their mantra used to be, “move fast and break things,” now it’s “move fast with stable infrastructure.” **What are the benefits to those more frequent releases? Obviously, as you’ve said, you can move more quickly, you don’t have a three year lag on what people want, but what are the other advantages?** You can move more quickly forward, you could also move more quickly back. Because if, from the very beginning, you say, “I am going to think carefully about how to segment this feature so that I can release it discreetly to some people,” that also means that you can roll it back very easily. So the way we used to build code was you used to have this massive, huge, monolithic code and you pushed it out, and then if something broke, you couldn’t fix it. You just had to take the entire release back. **And to look at it again from the developer perspective, how can you empower developers to move quickly and to implement Continuous Delivery practices?** I think it’s a restructuring of breaking down units of work into smaller and smaller and smaller units. If I want to move quickly, I need to break down this release that used to take six months into the smallest unit that I can do in a week? **Absolutely. It seems like you’d give the team a little bit more control over direction as well.** Continuous and Progressive Delivery are even more important than ever. A lot of the things that you could do when you’re all in the same office, you just can’t do anymore. You can’t just yell out, “Hey, is everybody ready to ship right now?” **Do you have any tips for teams that are working to coordinate while they’re distributed and working to implement Progressive Delivery?** Take it in small steps. I talked in the beginning about Microsoft transforming from a three year release to releasing every week or so, and I also said you need to do this very quickly, but you also need to do it right. So get comfortable with some low-risk features first. Don’t say, “Hey, we’re going to move from a three-month cycle to a daily cycle,” that’s terrifying. But if you’re at a three-month cycle, look at, “Hey, are there some low risk features that we could try to do in a week-long sprint? **Where does Cycle Time fit into all this? Why is it important when you’re trying to move to Continuous or Progressive Delivery?** Cycle Time is so important. The smaller the batches of work you do, the more impact each batch can have. If everything takes six months, you just don’t have many opportunities. The really seductive part of Continuous Delivery for a developer is that it’s really fun to see your stuff out in the world. If you’re an engineer, like I was in the ’90s, and you’re grinding away for months on a project, you don’t really get much of a feedback loop. Yeah. It’s happening extremely quickly. A lot of processes used to be half digital, half paper and now, you have to be fully digital. --- **_Note:_** The content above is a cleaned version of the original article highlighting key points and insights from the conversation between Hillary Nussbaum and Edith Harbaugh. It emphasizes the evolution of software development practices, the importance of Continuous and Progressive Delivery, and the benefits of shorter Cycle Times. The insights are intended for software engineering leaders and teams seeking to enhance their delivery practices.