The Problem with Stage Gates Isn’t the Gates

What makes stage-gate governance so frustrating in many organizations is that it unintentionally trains teams to behave in exactly the opposite way innovation requires. Instead of creating transparency, it creates presentation theater. Instead of encouraging fast learning, it encourages delayed escalation of problems. And instead of helping leadership stay closely connected to innovation efforts, it concentrates attention and decision-making into a handful of high-pressure meetings.

This frustration is everywhere.

Every company we have worked with or spoken to had some form of stage-gate process in place. And almost all of them complained about it. They complained about the bureaucracy. They complained about the speed. They complained about the quality of the decisions. Most importantly, they complained about the results.

In many organizations, governance cadence becomes disconnected from learning cadence, to the point where governance itself is often seen as little more than a bureaucratic layer.

Yet stage-gate governance exists for a reason.

Best practice tells us that companies should manage innovation through stage-gate reviews. In fact, the logic behind many modern stage-gate systems can be traced back to NASA’s Technology Readiness Level (TRL) framework — a governance model designed to reduce uncertainty and increase the probability of mission success. Over time, variations of this approach spread across industries and became standard practice for managing innovation.

In practice however, teams work for a predefined number of weeks or months and then present their progress in a formal review meeting where leadership makes a binary decision: progress the project to the next gate or stop it.

But this is also exactly what many people point to when they describe innovation governance as bureaucratic and low-value.

As much as people like to blame stage gates themselves, the problem is not the gates. The problem is twofold.

First problem

First, these meetings often become the only moments when leadership engages with teams, reviews evidence, and makes decisions. Governance becomes episodic, while learning and idea validation happen continuously. Over time, this creates poor outcomes: high cost of failure, low conversion rates, slow decision-making, and long time to market.

Second problem

Second, this setup pushes teams to optimize for the review meeting instead of for learning. Teams spend time preparing presentations, polishing narratives, and managing stakeholders’ perception instead of openly discussing risks, uncertainty, and what they are actually learning.

The goal slowly shifts from “building evidence” to “looking ready” for the gate.

Anyone who has worked on bringing a new product to market knows that ideas do not evolve in predefined intervals. Problems appear early. Assumptions change weekly. New information constantly reshapes direction.

But when governance only happens at review moments and decisions remain binary, learning gets delayed, compressed, and packaged for presentation.

This challenge is becoming even more visible in today’s AI race. Companies are launching hundreds of pilots and proofs of concept, yet many struggle to scale them into real businesses because governance systems cannot keep pace with the speed of learning and experimentation. The issue is no longer a lack of ideas. It is the inability to govern uncertainty at the pace innovation now moves.

The fix is not to remove stage gates and hand innovation teams a blank check. That usually leads to even worse outcomes.

First fix

The first fix is to create a continuous governance cadence between the gates — not by adding more bureaucracy, but by replacing high-pressure review events with smaller, faster, lower-friction decision loops.

This is where Venture Boards become useful.

Unlike traditional gate reviews, Venture Boards are not designed around presentation updates or milestone reporting. They are designed around evidence and learning.

Instead of meeting only when teams believe they are “ready” to progress, or when an arbitrary assigned timebox expires, leadership engages with teams through short, regular working sessions focused on a few simple questions:

• What have we learned since the last meeting?
• Which assumptions were validated or invalidated?
• What are the biggest risks today?
• What evidence do we still need before making a larger investment decision?

This changes the dynamic completely.

Teams no longer spend weeks preparing for one high-stakes presentation. Instead, evidence, uncertainty, and obstacles are discussed continuously and in smaller increments. Leadership stays connected to the real progress of the initiative, while teams get faster feedback and earlier support when problems emerge.

Most importantly, governance starts operating at the same speed as learning.

That does not mean every organization should adopt the same meeting cadence. The right frequency depends on the industry, the maturity of the initiative, and the operating context of the team. A biotech team working part-time on a highly regulated innovation effort may only generate meaningful learning every few weeks or months. A full-time team in retail banking, FMCG, or software may generate actionable insights every few days.

The cadence of governance should therefore not be driven by calendar-based reporting cycles, but by the speed at which teams can realistically generate and validate learning.

Instead of waiting months to discover that a key assumption was wrong, organizations can adjust direction continuously as new evidence appears.

The result is not more governance. In most cases, it is actually less bureaucracy, less politics, and better decisions.

Second fix

The second fix is to introduce a third decision option besides “stop” or “progress”: “persevere.”

This sounds simple, but in practice it requires a significant mindset shift.

I still remember one of our early Venture Building meetings with a large energy company. After every team presentation, leadership instinctively wanted to push the initiative forward to the next stage. The idea of “persevere” initially made no sense to them. If the team was working hard and making progress, why not progress the project?

But over time, through training and repeated reinforcement, leadership started understanding the difference between activity and evidence. A team could be working exceptionally well, generating valuable learning, and reducing uncertainty — while still not having enough evidence to justify progression to the next gate.

Today, that same organization actively uses the persevere option as part of its governance process.

Persevere acknowledges that the team is making progress and generating valuable learning, but that there is not yet enough evidence to move to the next gate. This shifts the focus from defending projects to developing evidence over time.

With these two relatively simple changes, stage gates stop being high-pressure performance events and become milestones that validate learning already discussed continuously. Teams spend less time optimizing PowerPoints and more time optimizing learning. Transparency increases. Decisions improve. Speed goes up. Waste goes down.

Our portfolio management and Innovation Accounting platform, SATORI, gives companies the flexibility to define how frequently they review each initiative, map their governance processes, and equip decision-makers to make one of three decisions at every review meeting: progress, persevere, or stop.

And over time, organizations start building something much more important than a governance process: a culture where evidence matters more than politics, learning matters more than certainty, and difficult conversations happen early instead of at the gate review.

A version of this article was initially published on the The Compass blog where I’m a regular contributor.