How to manage feature flags at scale: naming conventions, the flag lifecycle, cleanup discipline, audit trails, access control, and avoiding technical debt.
Creating a feature flag takes thirty seconds. Managing hundreds of them over years is where teams actually struggle. The cost of feature flags isn’t evaluating them — it’s the ones nobody removes, the targeting rules nobody understands, and the flag state nobody can see. Feature flag management is the set of practices that keep a growing flag system from turning into a liability.
If you’re still deciding whether to adopt flags at all, start with what are feature flags. This guide assumes you have flags and now need to govern them.
The flag lifecycle
Every flag has a lifespan, and most management problems come from ignoring it. A healthy flag moves through clear stages:
Created — with an owner, a category, and (for temporary flags) a removal plan.
Rolling out — enabled for internal users, then a percentage, then everyone.
Fully rolled out — at 100% for all users. For a temporary flag, this is the signal to start removing it.
Removed — both the dashboard flag and the dead else branch in code are deleted.
Permanent flags (kill switches, ops toggles) skip step 4 and live indefinitely. The whole discipline of flag management is making sure temporary flags actually reach step 4 instead of lingering at step 3 forever.
Name flags by intent, not implementation
A flag named “New dashboard v2” tells you what it wraps but not why it exists or when it ends. A useful feature flag naming convention uses a prefix that encodes the flag’s category — and therefore its expected lifespan:
release — gates a new feature during rollout. Temporary; remove after full release. e.g. release-dashboard-redesign
experiment — an A/B test with a defined end date. e.g. experiment-checkout-button
kill-switch — a permanent circuit breaker. Not expected to be removed. e.g. kill-switch-payments
ops — operational tuning, may be permanent. e.g. ops-cache-ttl
When you scan a list of 80 flags, the prefix instantly separates the temporary from the load-bearing. In Flaggy, you enter names as plain text — “Release dashboard redesign” — and the key release-dashboard-redesign is generated automatically for your code. We go deeper on naming in feature flag best practices.
Create the cleanup ticket at creation time
The single most effective management habit: file the removal ticket before you merge the code that introduces the flag. “Remove flag release-feature-name after full release.” A release flag’s lifespan is “rollout plus one release cycle” — make that explicit while the context is fresh, because nobody remembers to clean up a flag six months later when they’ve moved on to other work.
Fight flag debt with scheduled reviews
Even with good habits, some flags slip through. Run a recurring review — quarterly works for most teams — that pulls every flag unchanged in the last 90 days:
Fully rolled out and temporary - Delete it, and remove the dead branch in code.
A forgotten experiment - The test is over. Delete it.
Permanent (kill switch / ops) - Confirm it still has an owner, and leave it.
Use your platform’s analytics to see which flags are still actually evaluated in production. A flag that hasn’t been read by any SDK in months is almost always safe to remove.
Keep an audit trail
When a flag flips in production and something breaks, the first question is “who changed what, and when?” Without a record you’re guessing. An audit log that captures every flag change — value, targeting rule, who made it, timestamp — turns an incident postmortem from speculation into a lookup. Once more than one person can touch flags, this stops being optional.
Control who can change what
A junior engineer toggling a release flag in staging is fine. The same person flipping a kill switch on the payment system in production is not. Mature flag management means role-based access: who can create flags, who can edit production targeting, who can only view. Tie changes to identities (not a shared key) so the audit log is meaningful.
Centralize, don’t scatter
Flags spread across environment variables, hard-coded config files, and three different tools are impossible to govern — there’s no single list to review, no shared audit trail, no consistent naming. The foundation of feature flag management is a single flag management dashboard where every flag, rule, and change lives. Everything else in this playbook — reviews, audit, access control — depends on having one place to look.
A management checklist
- Every flag has an owner and a category prefix
- Temporary flags have a removal ticket filed at creation
- Stale flags are reviewed on a fixed schedule
- Every change is recorded in an audit log
- Production changes are gated by role-based access
- All flags live in one dashboard, not scattered across configs
Flaggy is built around exactly this — centralized flag management, segmentation, usage analytics, and a complete audit log — on a flat $99/month plan with unlimited seats and no per-user fees.
