Staging Environments Do Not Prevent Production Failures

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?