Many teams rely on staging environments to catch bugs before production — but what if that’s actually slowing you down and giving false confidence? In this talk, I’ll share how we eliminated our staging environment and built a pipeline that delivers faster, safer releases. We’ll cover the practical tooling we used, how feature flags and canary releases play a critical role, and the cultural mindset shift that made it work. You’ll walk away with concrete ideas for reducing deployment risk without relying on brittle pre-prod setups.

I got my first full-time developer job in 1999 and have been in software ever since. Over the years, I’ve worn many hats — developer, engineering manager, product manager — and I love building great products and teams. I’m currently CTO at Ivelum, where we create custom software for startups and enterprises, and I also work on Teamplify, a team management suite for engineering teams.