Toggle is more than a digital magazine for technology executives; it’s about the people who make IT work. We’re on a mission to find out how IT leaders keep their teams on track, avoid technical debt, and deliver results that matter to their organizations.
In our series of exclusive Q&As, we talk to some of these leaders — their strategies for digging out of technical debt, how they deliver on IT’s promise to the business, and how they maintain a healthy tech stack. In this episode, we’re talking to Mike Moran, the CTO of a multibillion-dollar financial services company. We asked him about how he keeps his team focused on what matters most, and how he manages the tension between maintaining his firm’s cutting-edge tech and keeping everyone else’s feet on the ground.
If you’re looking to grow your digital product team, Toggle is the place to find great talent. Our team of experts will help you find the right person for your product development team or engineering organization — from entry-level software engineers to senior managers. We’re here to support you through every step of your hiring process, from the first interview all the way through the integration and onboarding phase.
The toggle is a simple control that allows users to update settings, preferences, and other types of information. It’s important to provide clear and concise labels when using toggles, especially for those with less experience on your platform. Visual cues such as movement and color changes can also help avoid confusion. Additionally, it’s helpful to use the word toggle as a verb when describing how a user would interact with a switch, for example: “I like to toggle between the stream and map view while reading news articles.”
As an architectural pattern, toggles are ideally used as transitional elements — something that will be removed or replaced once its purpose is served. However, if a toggle becomes obsolete, it’s critical to clean it up quickly to reduce the overhead that unused toggles place on your codebase.
Feature toggles are a great tool to use when it comes to testing new features with your users. A toggle router can consistently send a given user down one path or another and allow you to measure the impact of various features with data-driven confidence.
However, it’s worth mentioning that creating a toggle for every bug fix can add unnecessary complexity to your codebase. Instead, we recommend evaluating case by case whether or not a toggle should be created for a specific bugfix and only applying the toggle once the fix has been tested in production. Furthermore, it’s important to prune the number of idle toggles in your codebase as soon as they reach the end of their useful life – otherwise they can create performance bottlenecks and slow down your CI/CD pipeline. Luckily, many modern CI/CD systems include tools to streamline toggle cleanup.