Readiness Levels Lie: What TRL, MRL and SCRL Reveal About Your SaaS

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The SaaS version of the claim “It works.” The feature demos, the deploy is green, a user is live, and for a long time I treated that as the hard part being over. Then I started borrowing vocabulary from hardware/manufacturing, where people are forced to be honest about the distance between “it works” and “I can ship a hundred thousand of these.”

Hardware engineers have a whole zoo of readiness levels for exactly this. There are separate scales for “the technology works,” “we can manufacture it,” and “our supply network can actually feed it.” They don’t collapse those into one number, because they learned the hard way that a single number lies. SaaS has no such discipline, and it increasingly needs one. The two biggest shifts in the physical economy right now, supply-chain resilience and local industrialization, are reaching up into software and changing what “ready” even means.

Readiness on Evgeny Ramenskiy

Readiness Levels Lie: What TRL, MRL and SCRL Reveal About Your SaaS