Beyond the Toggle: Feature Flags in the Context of Enterprise Compliance and Change Management

Customer Snapshot

• Industry: Financial Services (Insurance, Retirement, Investment)
• Employees: 40,000+
• Location: Newark, New Jersey (global operations across the U.S., Brazil, Japan, Europe, and India)
• Website: prudential.com
• Product Used: Unleash Enterprise

At a Glance

• Founded in 1875, Prudential is one of the world’s largest and most trusted financial services institutions.
  
• Operating across the globe, Prudential serves millions of customers through insurance, retirement, and investment products.
  
• The company’s technology landscape spans COBOL mainframes, modern cloud-native applications, and emerging AI-assisted workflows.
• Prudential’s central DevOps team leads an enterprise-wide initiative to simplify software delivery, strengthen compliance, and improve developer productivity across thousands of engineers.

 

Top Challenges

Prudential operates one of the most complex IT environments in the world. After 150 years of growth, acquisitions, and modernization, its systems range from COBOL-based mainframes to AI-enabled microservices. This diversity introduces major challenges around integration, governance, and reliability.

There was a desire at Prudential to use feature flags to reduce the risk of software releases. But because turning a feature flag on or off is considered a production change, each action must be tracked for audit and compliance. Traditional ticket-based workflows made this process cumbersome, slowing developers and creating friction between engineering and compliance.

Prudential’s global scale—with thousands of developers building hundreds of applications—required a centralized yet flexible approach that balanced control with speed. The rapid rise of AI-assisted development further increased the need for robust safeguards that could protect reliability while enabling innovation.

Why Unleash

After evaluating four feature management platforms, Prudential selected Unleash for its enterprise-first mindset, collaborative approach, and scalability across a diverse ecosystem.

Prudential’s DevOps leaders weren’t looking for another tool—they wanted a long-term partner capable of aligning with enterprise governance models and scaling across thousands of developers.

Enterprise Partnership
Unleash engaged directly with Prudential’s central DevOps organization to understand their mix of legacy and modern systems. Together, the teams co-designed a rollout and chargeback model that could flex across business units, ensuring both agility for small teams and control for the enterprise.

“The enterprise space is not simple. We’re a 150-year-old company with everything from COBOL to LLMs. Reliability is essential. We needed a vendor that truly understood the enterprise space—and Unleash was definitely the right choice.”

Compliance Alignment
Unleash was built to operate in heavily regulated environments. It fit naturally into Prudential’s change management and audit processes, allowing compliance requirements to be met automatically—without adding friction to the developer workflow.

Developer Experience at Scale
By integrating directly into Prudential’s centralized DevOps platform, PruPath, Unleash delivered a seamless onboarding experience. Developers are provisioned automatically through configuration-as-code, with governance and permissions preconfigured.

“From day one, our developers had zero-barrier onboarding. When they log into our DevOps platform, they instantly have Unleash—it’s completely adminless.”

Within months, over a thousand developers had access to Unleash, with thousands more joining as part of Prudential’s modernization effort.

The Benefits of Unleash

Compliance Made Invisible
Every feature flag change is automatically captured, traceable, and aligned with governance policies—removing the need for manual tickets or redundant workflows.

“Flipping a flag in production is a change that requires auditing. But more tickets is never the answer. With Unleash, our auditors are happy, and our developers never have to see ServiceNow. That’s a win-win.”

Enterprise-Ready Scalability
Unleash’s flexible deployment and pricing model allowed Prudential to scale feature management consistently across teams and technologies—supporting internal chargeback models and enabling shared infrastructure growth without operational overhead.

AI-Ready Control Layer
As AI-assisted development accelerates, Prudential relies on Unleash to safely manage experimentation, rollouts, and risk. Feature flags now serve as a control layer that ensures new AI-generated or AI-influenced code is introduced responsibly.

“As AI assistants start coming online, teams want to move faster—but we also have to make sure they don’t break things. That’s where Unleash comes in.”

The Business Outcomes

By adopting Unleash, Prudential unified developer velocity with enterprise-grade governance. Compliance workflows that once relied on manual tickets now run automatically in the background, creating a frictionless experience for both developers and auditors. Thousands of engineers onboard to Unleash through PruPath with no administrative effort, ensuring rapid, consistent adoption across the company.

The partnership between Prudential and Unleash has produced a scalable, compliant, and future-ready feature management platform—one capable of supporting the demands of legacy systems, modern cloud infrastructure, and the next wave of AI-driven software delivery.