Stage Gate Model: Your Guide for Successful Product Management.

What is the Stage Gate Model of development?

Stage Gate model, also known as Phase Gate process, is a technique for product development and management, which is divided into several stages or phases in order to break down complex tasks of development into smaller chunks of achievable goals. 

There are six stages in the process of product development and management. They are discovery, scoping, business conceptualization, development and execution, testing and validating, and finally launching the product. 

Every stage serves a unique purpose for the successful valuation of the product in the market. Accomplishment of all the stages in the model aids to reduce risk and uncertainty. 

After each stage, there is an enabled pause-for-thought in order to transition from one milestone to another. This pause between two stages is called a ‘Gate.’ 

The gate provides a juncture for quality check, approval of plans for the next stage, updating or modifying existing practice in order to speed up or upgrade the development process, and to evaluate the progress made so far. One of the following decisions is made at the gate: 

• Go: The project is successful enough for further development.

• Kill: The project is not meeting expectations and needs to be terminated.

• Hold: The project is on pause because it is not in the best interest to continue with and also not bad enough to abandon completely. Hence, it’s on hold awaiting implementation later on. 

• Recycle: The project is successful and has a lot more potential. Thus, necessary changes are incorporated.