[WYepQ4dNnG]

you need both, in my experience working in SaaS, enterprises expect reliable and stable platforms. A staging environment is that extra safety net that can help preventing shipping a completely broken product. In a staging env you can turn on/off experiments and feature flags before doing that in production.

That said, you should also build the product so that you can run experiment and only turn on a feature for a small sub set of production customers, usually the free tier. To then gradually rollout to everybody else.

Last, staging env should be considered a production-grade env, thus if it breaks there should be SRE/DEV on call ready to jump and fix it.