Flag Life: A 7‑Day Ritual + Contract to Stop Flag Sprawl

Feature flags accelerate launches and experiments — until proliferation, orphaned ownership, and environment drift turn them into a fragile, incident-prone surface. This episode opens with a 60–90 second engineer/PM clip recounting a rollout regression caused by a stale flag to set stakes, then delivers an auditable Flag Lifecycle Contract (read aloud and provided as a downloadable GitHub gist) and a step-by-step 7‑day Tidy ritual teams can run live. We provide a verbatim owner-assignment script for cross-functional meetings, a short implementation walkthrough (screen-share audio) that models the tidy in action, and clear pilot metrics: percent flags cataloged, time-to-retire, and flag-related incident rate. Role-specific rules for PMs, engineers and SREs plus a conservative "graduate vs retire" decision rule with mandatory verification steps help prevent regressions. Listeners leave with copy-paste artifacts, a short script to reduce behavioral friction, and a concrete CTA to run the tidy on one release stream and track measurable impact.

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