AI Stage-Gate Review

Use this skill to run a gate review for an AI product and reach a defensible decision: advance, fix-and-recycle, or stop. Stage-Gate is a portfolio-management process that structures an AI product from idea to scale: each stage of work ends at a gate where results are defended and a Go/Conditional/Kill decision is made. The useful output is not a checklist stamp. It is a decision that says what is proven, what is still a risk, what must be true to advance, and how much to invest next.

Provenance. This skill was inspired by and builds on work from Hushpar. It encodes a generic Stage-Gate process adapted for AI products — six stages on Discovery and Delivery tracks, traffic-light gates, and dual value-and-technical validation. It is a distilled, vendor-neutral adaptation, not a transcription of any one organization's internal playbook; tune the stages, criteria, and thresholds to your own portfolio. It is a sibling of ml-system-design-review in the same ML System Design skill collection: that skill judges how good a design is; this one judges whether it has earned the next investment.

The process runs on two tracks — Discovery (find and validate ideas) and Delivery (build and scale) — across six stages, with an optional Fast Track for low-uncertainty products. The AI difference is that value alone is never enough: technical feasibility, data, and alignment must clear each gate too.

Activation

Use when the user asks to run, prepare for, or judge:

• A gate review or gate defense for an AI product or feature.
• A Go / Kill / Pivot / Conditional-Go decision at any stage.
• Whether an AI initiative is ready to move from one stage to the next (idea → concept → prototype → beta → launch → scale).
• Triage or prioritization of a portfolio of AI ideas.
• Whether a product should take the full six-stage path or the Fast Track.

Do not use for reviewing the internal quality of an ML system design (use ml-system-design-review), for ordinary code review, or for model-training advice, unless the request is about the stage/gate decision.