Stop Shipping Beta Features

If you can’t be data-driven, take big swings.

You’re reading Playbooks & Priorities, a newsletter about working, parenting, and working parenthood.

---

The "beta" label has become a standard part of feature releases, particularly in enterprise SaaS. Companies as large as Google have kept products in beta for years (Gmail's beta lasted five years). One company I consulted with a couple of years ago would tell customers that a feature was in beta when they hadn’t yet built it to buy time to build it after closing the customer. But having “beta” features, while incredibly common in software development, is fundamentally at odds with building trusted products and driving user adoption.

The conventional wisdom suggests that beta labels serve multiple purposes- they:

• indicate features that need real-world validation,

• signal potential instability, and

• manage user expectations.

But this surface-level understanding masks a deeper truth: Beta labels are primarily about companies hedging their bets, and this hedging creates more problems than it solves.

The Real Purpose of Beta

To understand why betas should be eliminated, we must first start with aligning on their purpose. In my experience, companies typically encourage a “beta” in several scenarios:

1. When they're uncertain about user behavior and use cases

2. When they haven't fully tested scalability

3. When they're still exploring business models and pricing

4. When they want the flexibility to change APIs or interfaces

5. When their organization isn't fully ready to support the feature

6. When they want to create marketing buzz or exclusivity

Notably absent from this list is "when the feature isn't technically complete" – most beta features are functionally sound. The beta label instead represents uncertainty about everything else: product-market fit, scalability, go-to-market strategy, and organizational readiness.

The Uncertainty Tax

This brings us to the core problem: Beta labels create what I call an "uncertainty tax" on user adoption. When users encounter a beta feature, they face a series of unanswerable questions:

• Is this feature technically unstable or production-ready?

• Will this feature disappear in the next release?

• Will the interface or API change dramatically?

• Is this "beta" just marketing or a genuine warning?

• Should I invest time in learning and adopting this feature?

This uncertainty leads to rational but undesirable user behaviors. Users often wait to adopt features until they are no longer in beta, build temporary workarounds instead of embracing new capabilities, and avoid beta features in critical workflows even when they're technically solid. The very label intended to drive adoption and feedback actually prevents it.

The Aggregation of Commitment

Just as Ben Thompson's Aggregation Theory describes how internet companies aggregate user attention and supplier relationships, successful software products aggregate user trust and workflows. Beta labels fundamentally work against this aggregation by creating islands of uncertainty within your product.

Every beta label is an asterisk in your product story, a caveat in your sales narrative, and a reason for users to hesitate before committing to your platform. In enterprise software, where the network effects of workflow integration are particularly powerful, this hesitation can be fatal to feature adoption.

The Alternative: Full Commitment or Nothing

The solution is surprisingly simple but requires significant organizational discipline: stop having beta features. Every feature in your product should be something you fully stand behind. This creates a binary choice:

1. The feature is ready for production use, fully supported, and part of your product

2. The feature doesn't exist in your product yet

This binary approach forces better product development practices:

• More thorough discovery and validation before shipping

• Stronger conviction about feature decisions

• Clear commitment to supporting and maintaining features

• Better alignment between product development and go-to-market readiness

If you spend less time estimating and more time iterating, you’ll end up shipping smaller, solid features that can be generally available with running them through a beta.

Managing Risk Without Beta

Let me anticipate the pushback: How can companies manage release risk and gather feedback without beta labels? The answer lies in more sophisticated product development practices:

1. Use feature flags and gradual rollouts for controlled deployment and experimentation

2. Run robust internal dogfooding programs

3. Establish customer advisory boards for early feedback

4. Build and test prototypes that never touch production, including watching users interact with mockups

These approaches allow for careful feature validation without creating uncertainty in your product surface area.

For a typical SaaS company, your dev time is the single most precious resource you have. The more you can protect to ensure you’re not building features you’re going to shutter by validating a problem beforehand, the better steward you are of company resources. Some very specific examples of how to do this:

• Pre-sell features. Build features because you have 1-3 customers willing to pay for them; not saying that they’d maybe pay for it, have them sign for it.

• Ask users to interact with high-fidelity mockups. Use tools like bolt.new or high fidelity Figma mockups to have users interact with features long before you’d put any eng effort into it.

• Have design partners. Never build for hypothetical users. Always put a feature in the context of a specific customer’s problem.

The Competitive Advantage of Commitment

In the long run, developing user trust in the features you ship will create:

1. Faster feature adoption due to clearer user confidence signals

2. Stronger product narrative without caveats or asterisks

3. More efficient development due to stronger upfront validation

4. Better user trust through consistent commitment to features

5. Clearer organizational alignment around feature readiness

The Future of Feature Release

The beta label feels like a relic of an earlier era – when software was less mission-critical and users were more tolerant of uncertainty. But why would a customer build a workflow behind a feature you’re not willing to stand behind? I wouldn’t.

The next era of software development is quickly approaching. AI is changing how companies develop software and what that software does. The companies that will survive and thrive will be those that take full responsibility for their product decisions, commit fully to their features, and earn user trust through consistency- rather than hedging their bets with beta labels.

The end of beta doesn't mean the end of innovation or careful feature rollouts. Instead, it means entering a more reliable era of software development, where companies do the hard work of validation and commitment before asking users to change their workflows. In a world where user trust and adoption are the key currencies of success, this commitment-first approach isn't just good practice – it's a competitive necessity.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​