Assume your code is looking for the file say app.properties. Copy this file to any dir and add this dir to classpath, by creating a setenv.sh in the bin dir of tomcat.
In your setenv.sh of tomcat( if this file is not existing, create one , tomcat will load this setenv.sh file.
#!/bin/sh
CLASSPATH="$CLASSPATH:/home/user/config_my_prod/"
You should not have your properties files in ./webapps//WEB-INF/classes/app.properties
Tomcat class loader will override the with the one from WEB-INF/classes/
A good read: https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.0-doc/class-loader-howto.html