Phase-gate process

Some of those decisions work out, others don't, and in almost every case, the root cause, when you trace it back honestly, is that the decision to commit to that launch date was made before the development process had generated enough evidence to support it.

That is the problem in the Stage-Gate framework that was designed to solve, and it's what we're building on today.

[upbeat music] What's up, everyone? And welcome back to Manufacturing Made Simple.

I'm Andrew Cheung, and this is episode twenty-one.

But before that, remember to hit the follow button on Spotify and also on Instagram at manufacturingmadesimplepod to support this podcast.

A huge shout-out to those who have already done so, 'cause we see you, and the support has been huge on keeping us going.

Episode twenty-one is the process architecture, the Stage-Gate framework, what the go and no-go decision criteria looks like at each gate, how scale-up fits into development timelines, and how to structure the contract manufacturer relationship to support rather than constrain the launch.

Episode twenty-two next week is about what happens when launches go wrong, the most common failure modes across both industries, and how the postmortem thinking can become a proactive design tool rather than just a retrospective exercise.

At HP, we funded innovation in stages.

An idea had to earn its next round of money at a checkpoint we called StageGate.

where the team answered a set of questions before anything moved forward.

We ran four gates, market validation, customer validation, a limited launch, and then a full launch.

And I think that distinction becomes even more important as we move towards AI systems that are just analyzing information, right, but increasingly capable of taking action themselves.

But we spoke about this throughout, and that's the human element about this, right? Where does the human fit into that process as AI becomes more autonomous? You know, could visualization act as a decision gate, or does it give humans the context they need before AI actually takes that action?

Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating watching all this play out.

We took a kind of agnostic position on this.

You're going to have to find a way to work with that AI.

It needs to be able to tell you what it recommends in a clear, easy to understand way.

So I think the decision gate aspect is one of these things where It really depends on what you're doing.

If you need a decision gate, then some human is going to have to make that choice.