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Stage Gate

Overview

Want a smarter way to bring your ideas to life? Meet Stage Gate - your friendly guide to innovation. Think of it as a journey with helpful checkpoints along the way. At each "gate," you get to pause, evaluate your progress, and make sure you're on the right track. This practical approach helps teams focus their energy on the most promising ideas, manage risks effectively, and bring great innovations to life faster.

Stages:

The process is typically divided into stages like:

  • Focus: Ideation, research and brainstorming.
  • Discover: Defining the project scope and potential.
  • Prototype: Creating a functional prototype or product.
  • Pilot Verifying the product's functionality and market fit.
  • Scale: Releasing the product to the market.

Methods are typically revisited across the lifecycle.

Gates:

Between each stage are decision points (gates) where a cross-functional team evaluates the project's progress and makes a "Go/No-Go" decision. This allows organisations to:

  • Filter out weak ideas: Projects that don't meet the criteria at a particular gate are stopped, saving resources.
  • Prioritise resources: The process helps ensure that resources are focused on the most promising projects.
  • Manage risk: By evaluating projects at each gate, organizations can identify and mitigate potential risks early on.

Benefits

  • Increased innovation speed and quality: The structured approach helps accelerate the innovation process and improve the quality of the final product.
  • Improved resource allocation: By prioritizing projects based on their potential, resources are allocated more effectively.
  • Enhanced risk management: The process allows organisations to identify and manage risks early on.
  • Better decision-making: Clear decision points and structured evaluations help ensure that decisions are data-driven.
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Playlist Sequence

1

Focus

1

Challenge Brief

A successful innovation begins with a great challenge - it can be a problem or an opportunity.

2

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Roadmap

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Business Model Canvas

All the substance of a business plan without the months of writing, with 9 essential elements that transform customer needs into money-making ventures.

3

Total Addressable Market

A method for estimating the total revenue potential for your solution if you captured the entire target market, helping you determine if an opportunity is worth pursuing.

4

Research Plan

Every challenge is different, so take some time to develop and execute a research plan that's custom made to deeply understand your challenge.

2

Discover

5

Research Plan

Every challenge is different, so take some time to develop and execute a research plan that's custom made to deeply understand your challenge.

6

User Personas

A method for creating realistic representations of your key user types that capture their goals, behaviors, and pain points to guide product decisions.

7

Customer Journey Map

A visual storytelling technique that maps out each step of a customer's experience with your product or service, capturing both actions and emotions along the way.

8

Problem Interview

A structured customer discovery technique to validate problem hypotheses, understand existing solutions, and identify early adopters before committing to building a specific solution.

9

User Personas

A method for creating realistic representations of your key user types that capture their goals, behaviors, and pain points to guide product decisions.

10

Customer Journey Map

A visual storytelling technique that maps out each step of a customer's experience with your product or service, capturing both actions and emotions along the way.

11

Problem Statement Reframing

Properly framing the innovation challenge is critical to your success.

12

Value Proposition Canvas

A structured framework for aligning your product or service offerings with specific customer needs, ensuring you create value that matters to your target audience.

13

Business Model Canvas

All the substance of a business plan without the months of writing, with 9 essential elements that transform customer needs into money-making ventures.

14

Total Addressable Market

A method for estimating the total revenue potential for your solution if you captured the entire target market, helping you determine if an opportunity is worth pursuing.

3

Prototype

15

How Might We...?

A powerful question-framing technique that transforms research insights into opportunity spaces, setting the stage for innovative solution brainstorming.

16

Value Proposition Canvas

A structured framework for aligning your product or service offerings with specific customer needs, ensuring you create value that matters to your target audience.

17

Brainstorming

A creative group ideation technique designed to generate a large quantity of diverse solutions to well-defined challenges.

18

Storyboarding

A visual storytelling technique that uses a sequence of images to illustrate how a user would interact with your solution in a specific scenario.

19

Storyboarding

A visual storytelling technique that uses a sequence of images to illustrate how a user would interact with your solution in a specific scenario.

20

Prototyping

A hands-on technique for rapidly bringing ideas to life in a tangible form that can be tested with real users to validate assumptions before significant investment.

21

Surface Assumptions

A systematic approach for identifying and prioritizing the critical assumptions underlying your product concept before testing with real users.

22

Prototype Test Plan

Test each of the individual key assumptions and the envisaged value propositions.

23

Solution Interview

A solution interview is a form of a customer interview to test if you are on the right path.

24

MVP Specification

A strategic approach to defining the minimal feature set needed to deliver value to customers, test market assumptions, and validate business potential with minimal investment.

25

Competitive Position

A strategic assessment tool that helps teams differentiate their offerings from competitors by focusing on the two priorities customers care about most.

26

Business Model Canvas

All the substance of a business plan without the months of writing, with 9 essential elements that transform customer needs into money-making ventures.

27

Total Addressable Market

A method for estimating the total revenue potential for your solution if you captured the entire target market, helping you determine if an opportunity is worth pursuing.

4

Pilot

28

Pilot Success Metrics

Obtain quantitative metrics regarding the adoption rate of your Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

29

Pilot Canvas

The Pilot Canvas is a 1-page planning tool specifically designed to help you define and plan your pilot.

30

Competitive Position

A strategic assessment tool that helps teams differentiate their offerings from competitors by focusing on the two priorities customers care about most.

31

Business Model Canvas

All the substance of a business plan without the months of writing, with 9 essential elements that transform customer needs into money-making ventures.

32

Total Addressable Market

A method for estimating the total revenue potential for your solution if you captured the entire target market, helping you determine if an opportunity is worth pursuing.

5

Scale

33

Economic Logic Summary

The goal of articulating your high-level Economic Logic is to show sponsors and funders that you understand what drives growth and profitability.

34

Product Roadmap

A strategic planning tool that maps out how your product will evolve over time, from dominating your initial market to expanding into new territories.

35

Customer Acquisition Scaling

A strategic method for identifying and addressing the bottlenecks that could limit your ability to grow your customer base at scale.

36

Scale Transition Planning

A systematic approach for transitioning from innovation mode to execution mode, building the critical systems needed to grow from startup to sustainable business.

37

Value Chain Scaling

Map the end-to-end value chain and asses what's required to scale.