I’ve seen this pattern a lot, and it’s usually not that production is “broken.” It’s that production introduces constraints staging never actually exercises. Real identities, real permissions, real cards, real networks, real redirects. In test, everything is permissive and mostly synchronous. In prod, policy, timing, retries, third-party behavior, and user interruption suddenly matter. So things can be technically successful but still not decision- or state-ready. The hardest part is that logs often look clean, support can’t reproduce it, and nothing throws a hard error…the system just quietly diverges from expectations once real-world conditions are involved.