The SaaS Product Development Lifecycle, Stage by Stage

Search for "SaaS product development lifecycle" and you'll find a hundred neat diagrams with five or six boxes. Idea, design, build, test, launch, maintain. Clean. Easy to remember. Here is the thing nobody says out loud: there is no official SaaS lifecycle. No standards body publishes one. The cloud vendors don't agree with each other. And the five-box version quietly skips the parts that make…