Graphite’s journey started in 2020 when Greg Foster - a former infrastructure engineer at Airbnb - joined forces with a few close friends—including an engineer from Facebook—to solve a big problem: how to make collaborative code review faster and more efficient.

While they started small, Graphite is now close to 40 people with around 15 engineers. By the end of the year, they plan on having over 30+ engineers and a total headcount of 60 to 70. Given that Graphite has consistently doubled or tripled in size annually and being a tool that was built by engineers for engineers, the need for scalable tools to support fast and precise releases could not be more clear.

Realizing the Need for a Feature Management System

Drawing from their experiences at Airbnb and Facebook, the founders of Graphite had firsthand experience with advanced engineering tools which allowed them to iterate rapidly and precisely in their previous roles. They recognized the necessity of these powerful tools for their own fast-growing startup, especially given their ambitious growth plans ahead.

From day one, Graphite recognized the importance of having a robust system to manage feature rollouts. As Greg put it, feature flagging wasn’t optional—it was essential.

“We believed feature flags were table stakes from day one. As a five-person engineering team, it simply didn't make sense to build our own in-house solution—we needed every engineering resource dedicated to building our core product. As Bezos says, we had to focus on what makes our beer taste better.”

Greg Foster

Co-founder and CTO, Graphite

They briefly considered other platforms like Split and LaunchDarkly but soon hit two major roadblocks: (1) it did not seem to be self-serve and (2) the pricing was steep for their lean engineering team:

“We considered LaunchDarkly, but the experience wasn’t self-serve, and the pricing model felt better suited for larger organizations than a small, fast-moving team like ours.”

Greg Foster

Co-founder and CTO, Graphite

That’s when Graphite came across Statsig, sometime around 2022. Its self-serve model, transparent pricing, and powerful feature flagging capabilities stood out right away. No drawn-out sales cycles or hefty upfront costs—just a flexible plan that made it easy to start small and scale over time.

Putting Statsig to Work

After adopting Statsig, Graphite quickly expanded beyond basic feature flags. Today, they actively use 321 feature gates and 168 dynamic configs across their applications, enabling fine-grained control and rapid iteration.

• Feature Gates: Widely implemented across their application for:
  • Rapid UI changes and splash pages
  • New internal or beta user interfaces
  • Customized onboarding experiences
  • Testing various LLM pipelines and prompt strategies
• Dynamic Configs: Leveraged for complex rollout scenarios and precise user targeting:
  • Quickly managing customer opt-outs for early AI feature rollouts
  • Configuring inputs (e.g., models, prompts) for LLM-based applications
  • Circuit breakers to maintain stability during high-load situations

Reflecting on several years with Statsig, Greg Foster, CTO of Graphite, emphasizes the ease and reliability of the platform:

“There are two primary ways I interact with Statsig: through the SDK in code and the Console UI. Both methods feel intuitive and efficient. The SDK ergonomics are excellent, performance is consistently reliable, and the UI experience is seamless.”

Greg Foster

Co-founder and CTO, Graphite

Graphite’s strategic use of Statsig has enabled their engineering team to remain agile and precise, significantly accelerating product development and deployment.

Speed, Control, and Peace of Mind

Feature flags are now essential to Graphite’s entire development workflow. They offer:

• Faster releases: No need to wait for lengthy deployment cycles or PR merges for every small tweak.
• Granular control: Roll out features to 5%, 10%, or 50% of users—or skip entire segments if needed.
• Immediate kill switches: If something goes wrong, they can flip a switch and disable the feature instantly.

Statsig’s feature management has significantly accelerated Graphite’s release velocity. Greg highlights the direct impact:

“We do a lot of partial rollouts, and if that was all handled in code, we’d be shipping at a much slower pace. With Statsig, I can adjust something from 10% to 20% in seconds. That level of speed and control is game-changing. It completely changes the pace at which we iterate and ship.”

Greg Foster

Co-founder and CTO, Graphite

Graphite’s toughest moments occur when something breaks in production—exactly when Statsig proves most valuable. In one notable incident, a niche database call triggered by a user with an unusually large number of continuous integration (CI) jobs caused significant database stress, threatening to take down the site.

Thanks to a dynamic config set up just a week earlier, the team quickly pinpointed and mitigated the problematic load. Within seconds of applying a targeted configuration change, the site recovered almost immediately. This scenario isn’t uncommon: Statsig regularly cuts incident resolution times by half or more, providing Graphite with rapid, precise, and reliable control exactly when it’s needed most.

“There are moments when things go wrong and you need to act fast. Statsig lets us make changes instantly, with total confidence. The platform is built for speed and correctness—even in high-pressure situations where getting it right really matters.”

Greg Foster

Co-founder and CTO, Graphite

By providing Graphite with both rapid deployment capabilities and robust control mechanisms, Statsig empowers the team to confidently iterate faster without compromising stability or reliability.

Looking Ahead

As Graphite continues its rapid growth, expecting to expand to 60-70 employees—including over 30 engineers—by year-end, they plan to further deepen their use of Statsig.

By combining their rapid development mindset with Statsig’s powerful feature management tools, Graphite can maintain a pace that delights their customers and empowers their engineers—no matter how large they grow.

It’s a strategy that’s worked well so far, and one they intend to keep leveraging as they build the future of code review.

With a rapidly expanding user base, the team also sees a clear opportunity to leverage Statsig’s experimentation capabilities, seamlessly building on their existing use of feature flags and dynamic configs.

Given Graphite’s alignment with Statsig’s vision of delivering best-in-class developer tools, the team is excited to deepen their partnership and continue innovating together, driving forward the future of developer workflows.

About Graphite

Founded in 2020, Graphite is a fast-growing code review platform built by engineers, for engineers. Designed to accelerate collaboration and ship high-quality code faster, Graphite powers development workflows for high-performing teams. Today, Graphite supports thousands of engineers across rapidly scaling organizations, helping them review, merge, and deploy code with speed, precision, and confidence.