There’s a hard truth most teams don’t want to hear: your staging environment isn’t saving you from production failures. It’s just giving you false confidence.
For years, teams have clung to the Dev-Test-Staging-Production model, thinking it’s the gold standard for safety. But here’s the problem—staging is a mirage. It never truly mirrors production, and every delay in feedback makes it harder to fix problems when they inevitably surface in the real world.
The reality? The only way to know how software behaves in production is to put it in production.
This is why the best engineering teams are ditching the old way in favour of audience-based deployment—rolling out changes incrementally to real users, in production, with observability and automated safeguards in place. This isn’t reckless; it’s smart.
If you’re still relying on pre-prod environments for confidence, it’s time to ask yourself: Are they really reducing risk, or just making failures more expensive?
If you've made it this far, it's worth connecting with our principal consultant and coach, Martin Hinshelwood, for a 30-minute 'ask me anything' call.
We partner with businesses across diverse industries, including finance, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, technology, engineering, transportation, hospitality, entertainment, legal, government, and military sectors.
ALS Life Sciences
Boxit Document Solutions
Xceptor - Process and Data Automation
Kongsberg Maritime
NIT A/S
Milliman
Freadom
Alignment Healthcare
Teleplan
Sage
Healthgrades
Lockheed Martin
MacDonald Humfrey (Automation) Ltd.
Hubtel Ghana
Brandes Investment Partners L.P.
Flowmaster (a Mentor Graphics Company)
Higher Education Statistics Agency
Workday
Ghana Police Service
Washington Department of Enterprise Services
Department of Work and Pensions (UK)
Washington Department of Transport
Royal Air Force
New Hampshire Supreme Court
ALS Life Sciences
Jack Links
Qualco
DFDS
New Signature
Trayport