Your Staging Environment Is Lying to You: How We Made Preprod Real
Article summary
Your Staging Environment Is Lying to You: How We Made Preprod Real We didn’t trust our staging environment-and we were right not to. Incidents kept slipping past it. Regression bugs that never showed up in tests. Latency spikes that only appeared under real traffic. Every time we shipped with confidence, something cracked in production. The environment wasn’t broken. It was irrelevant. We had cloned the wrong parts of prod-and ignored the ones that mattered. This is the story of how we rebuilt our preprod to reflect real-world risk, not false confidence. What Was Wrong With Our Staging Setup Config drift: Secrets, tokens, flags, and feature toggles were always a few steps behind. Missing third parties: APIs we depended on didn’t behave the same-or weren’t even wired in. No real traffic simulation: We had fake users and happy paths.
Read Full Article on MediumPractical takeaway
The main idea behind Your Staging Environment Is Lying to You: How We Made Preprod Real is to help teams move from broad theory to clear, repeatable decision making. When teams apply this thinking, they reduce ambiguity and focus on improvements that deliver measurable momentum.
Example scenario
Imagine a team facing competing priorities. By applying the ideas in Your Staging Environment Is Lying to You: How We Made Preprod Real, they can map dependencies, identify risks and choose the next move that produces progress without destabilizing their system.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Trying to redesign everything instead of taking small steps.
- Ignoring real constraints like incentives, ownership or legacy systems.
- Creating documents that do not lead to any change in code or decisions.
How to apply this in real work
Start by identifying where Your Staging Environment Is Lying to You: How We Made Preprod Real already shows up in your architecture or delivery flow. Then pick one area where clarity would reduce friction. Apply the idea, measure its effect and share the learning.
Signs you are doing it correctly
- Teams make decisions faster and with fewer disagreements.
- Architectural conversations become clearer and less abstract.
- Changes land safely with fewer surprises or rework cycles.