The two ways a launch dies
I designed and ran a stage gate for a supplement company with 30+ active projects, after years of watching launches stall on the commercial side. The failures were never about the science. They came in two shapes.
The idea that never gets a decision. Someone in R&D or sales has a good concept. It gets discussed, a sample is made, a few people are enthusiastic, and it sits. Nobody owns the decision to fund it or kill it, so it stays in a permanent maybe, consuming a little attention from everyone and a lot from whoever proposed it. Eighteen months later a competitor launches it.
The decision made without the facts. The opposite failure. Leadership loves a concept and green-lights it in a meeting. Then the supply team finds the key ingredient has a single supplier with a 26-week lead time, regulatory finds the intended claim is not supportable in two of the target markets, and finance finds the margin only works at a volume the channel will never deliver. The launch slips three times and arrives late, overpriced, or quietly cancelled.
A stage gate fixes both because it does two things at once: it forces a decision at fixed points, and it defines what has to be known before each decision can be made.
Five gates, one page
The version I use has five gates. Companies sometimes want more; more gates means more meetings and less speed. Five is enough to catch the two failures above without turning product development into paperwork.
| Gate | The question | What has to be known | Who decides |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0. Idea | Is this worth two weeks of someone's time? | One page: the customer, the problem, the rough product, why us. Nothing more. | Product lead, alone. Fast yes or no. |
| 1. Concept | Is there a product and a business here? | Target formula direction, claim strategy, target channels and price point, competitive set, rough volume and margin, key supply risks named. | Cross-functional gate meeting. |
| 2. Feasibility | Can we make it, claim it and sell it at this margin? | Formula locked or near, supplier terms and lead times, regulatory review of claims by market, cost of goods, channel commitments or strong signals, packaging direction. | Gate meeting. This is the gate that kills the most projects, and should. |
| 3. Development | Is it ready to make and ready to sell? | Stability and testing plan, artwork and label approved by regulatory, demand plan by channel and market, launch plan with dates, first production order sized. | Gate meeting. |
| 4. Launch | Go. | Product in inventory, sell-in complete, marketing live, customer service briefed, success metrics defined for the 90-day review. | Commercial lead. |
The column that matters most is the third one. Writing down what has to be known before each gate is what makes the process useful, because it stops the second failure mode. Nobody can green-light a product at Gate 2 without supplier lead times and a claims review in hand, and nobody has to argue about whether those things are needed, because the page says so.
Who sits in the room
Every gate meeting from 1 through 3 has the same people: science or R&D, quality and regulatory, supply chain or operations, commercial (sales and marketing, ideally one voice), and finance. Five functions, one representative each, with authority to speak for their function. If a function sends someone who has to "check with their boss," the gate has not happened.
Two design choices that made a difference in practice:
- One meeting, all active projects. A monthly gate review where every project at a gate is decided in one sitting. This creates a portfolio view leadership never had before and stops the calendar filling with one-off project meetings. It also makes the tradeoffs visible: funding project A means project B waits, and everyone sees that.
- A project owner who is not the champion. The person who had the idea should present it. The person who shepherds it through the gates should be someone whose job is the process, not the product. Otherwise every gate becomes a negotiation with the idea's parent.
Sizing it for your company
A $5M brand with three people in product development does not need the same process as a $100M manufacturer with 30 projects in flight. The five gates stay the same. What changes is the ceremony.
- Under $10M: Gates 1 through 3 can be one recurring 60-minute meeting a month with the founder and three functional leads. The "what has to be known" list is a shared document. The main value is the discipline of killing things at Gate 2.
- $10M to $50M: A named process owner, a monthly portfolio review, a one-page gate template per project, and a simple tracker showing every project's gate and next date. This is where the portfolio view starts paying for itself, because this is the size where five projects quietly become fifteen.
- Over $50M: Formal decision rights, resource allocation tied to gate decisions, and integration with S&OP so a Gate 3 approval automatically enters the demand plan. This is where the process I built landed, across 30+ projects, and where it started reducing cycle times because supply and regulatory questions were being asked at Gate 1 instead of discovered at Gate 3.
Three things specific to supplements
Generic stage gate models come from industrial and pharmaceutical product development. Supplements differ in ways that should show up in the "what has to be known" column.
- Claims decide the product, not the other way round. In most categories you design a product and then decide how to describe it. In supplements, what you can say (structure-function claims in the US, health claims in the EU, the specific regulatory path for animal health products by country) determines whether the product has a reason to exist. Claims review belongs at Gate 1, before formula work goes far.
- Ingredient supply is the schedule. Branded ingredients with a single source, novel ingredients with unresolved regulatory status in a target market, and contract manufacturers with long queues are where launch dates go to die. Supplier terms and lead times are a Gate 2 requirement, and a supply risk rating should follow the project through every gate.
- Channel commitment before production. Supplement channels have long sell-in cycles: veterinary distributors, specialty retail resets, marketplace listing approvals. A first production order sized on a demand plan with no channel commitments behind it is how you end up with a warehouse of product approaching its best-by date. Gate 3 should require either commitments or a demand plan the commercial lead is willing to sign.
Getting started
If you are installing this from nothing, do it in this order: write the "what has to be known" list for Gates 1, 2 and 3 with your functional leads in one afternoon; put every current project on a single page with its gate; hold the first portfolio review and make at least one kill decision. The kill decision is the point. A process that has never said no is a calendar entry, not a gate.
I design and install this process for supplement brands, then facilitate the first two gate meetings so it sticks. If that would help, here is how that engagement works.