Last week I made a little internal app that makes it easy for anyone on the @Buffer team to roll out a feature to early access.

Does this capability already exist? Sure! We use Split (now @Harness) for feature flagging, and it’s a powerful tool, but it’s UI is…not the friendliest for a less technical person.

More importantly, we want to be sharing more of our work with our users earlier on. We strive to achieve product-market fit & a high confidence in what we ship through engaging with the folks who rely on Buffer, not before we’ve shown it to them. We have multiple programs at our disposal for this – they’re not quite rocket science:

🤫 Alpha is reserved for small, curated user segments (I used to call these “secret features” 😆 ). Especially helpful for a higher-risk change or something for which we need feedback from a particular type of customer. We often invite users in our Discord community to participate in alphas, and we discuss feedback right in the server or over email.

🏊 Beta is a much wider open pool. Anyone can enable Beta features within their Buffer account, and submit feedback directly within the product. We use this for lower-risk or net-new ideas, though we want to get these new ideas in the hands of customers earlier.

Sure, we are a team of creators ourselves! But we don’t represent every possible user of Buffer across our team, and we have our own biases. The input from real users – especially early on – is invaluable.

So I just made the tool we need, thanks to some investment in internal tools infrastructure (shoutout @Hamish Macpherson @Martín García @Miguel David @Peter Emil for your work here!) This little tool makes it possible for anyone on the team – a PM, designer, even a customer advocate working with AI to fix a bug – to quickly roll that change out to our open beta program, or just 1-2 users who might benefit from seeing it early.

And it’s such a nice win-win! Our customers love seeing what we’re working on, and we get such valuable feedback in return. Folks feel seen and get more value early, and we almost always end up shipping a better product.

(by the way: custom templates is in beta, go check it out!!!)