Graham McNicoll

If your team already has feature flags wired into production, you can run painted door tests on every speculative feature on the roadmap in minutes. Most of you have not realized how easy it can be. Most teams I talk to have heard of a painted door test. Most of them have not run one. The reason is usually the same. The concept makes sense in a blog post. Nobody has walked them through what it actually looks like inside their product, on a Monday morning, using the flags they already have in production. So it stays a concept, and they ship the full feature instead. Here is the sequence that moves it from concept to a thing your team runs next week. 1. Pick the feature on your roadmap that you are least sure about. The one where the business case is a slide with three bullets and a guess. That is the test candidate. Features your team has strong user signal on do not need a painted door. Features nobody has ever validated do. 2. Find the entry point. The button, the menu item, the upsell, the banner. Whatever the user would tap if the full feature existed. That is all you are building. 3. Wrap the entry point in a flag and ship it along with a "coming soon page" to a slice of your users. The flag is the same kind your team already uses for safe rollouts (assuming your feature flagging platform makes it easy to AB test). 4. Attach metrics to the experiment around engagement and form completions. Clicks on the entry point, by cohort. Be sure to also measure guard rail metrics around side effects of this painted door, as it might cannibalize other parts of your product. That is the full setup. Under an hour of engineering time for a team that already has flags wired in. What you get back is the cheapest product signal you will ever run. A feature that would have taken a quarter to build either has demand or it does not. If the signal is there, the full build is justified. If it is not, the team did not spend three months finding out. The hard work of wiring flags into production is already done. This is the second use of infrastructure your team built for something else. Turn a flag you already have into a painted door test at growthbook.io/features, or send me a DM if you want a walkthrough for your stack.