Surfline Chooses Split to Improve Phased Feature Rollouts

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., March 15, 2018 -- Split, the leading feature experimentation platform, today announced that Surfline, the market leader in surf forecasting, reporting, live webcasting, photography, videography, and editorial coverage on surfing is utilizing Split to improve the speed of ongoing feature rollouts and strengthen experimentation capabilities to enhance overall platform efficiency.

As Surfline grew to become the world’s largest surf forecasting site with the largest marine camera network in the world, the product and engineering teams building and maintaining the site grew simultaneously. The team started using various approaches to handle the increasing scale of new products and features. Unfortunately, feature releases and product deployments were all or nothing. If a release candidate had important updates or new features, yet it also introduced bugs, there was no way to choose only the desired code updates to deploy in production.

“By using Split’s controlled rollout capability, the release responsibility within our organization shifted from Q/A and software engineers to product owners,” says Drew Newberry, senior software engineering manager at Surfline. “This shift freed up our engineers from needing to maintain and integrate long-running feature branches that wound up at times being problematic to merge. During large feature development, this could take up to half an engineer’s bandwidth to manage.”

To date, Surfline has tested parameters such as how forced user registration impacts engagement across the site, as well as experiment with different options for how to present products on its site. Additionally, the company has successfully tested a new search results User Experience (UX), as well as the resulted click-through rates and engagement.

“Split is successfully touching so many parts of Surfline’s business - the benefits are undeniable. Split handles Surfline’s basic needs to separate feature release from code deployment, but the platform also brought additional functionality and accessibility for product managers to easily monitor and change the state of a feature rollout. We’re thrilled we can assist Surfline in this way and look forward to seeing the way they continue to use our platform,” said Patricio Echague, chief technology officer and co-founder at Split.

For more information, download the Surfline case study here: https://www.split.io/customers/surfline/

To sign up for Split, visit https://www.split.io/ or contact [email protected]

About Split
Split is the leading platform for feature experimentation, empowering businesses of all sizes to make smarter product decisions. Companies like Salesforce, Vevo, and Twilio, rely on Split to securely release new features, target them to customers, and measure the impact of features on their customer experience metrics. Founded in 2015, Split's team comes from some of the most innovative enterprises in Silicon Valley, including Google, LinkedIn, Salesforce and Databricks. Split is based in Redwood City, California and backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Accel Partners, and Harmony Partners. To learn more about Split, contact [email protected], or start a 14-day free trial at www.split.io/signup.

Media Contact:
Sophia Xepoleas for Split
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