Articles & Perspectives

Q&A with Innovation Expert Rachael Strieter: Polishing Stage-Gate to Speed Innovation

6 minute read

Many companies blame their stage-gate process when innovation is taking too long. However, the problem is rarely the framework. More often, delays come from unclear decision criteria, cultural barriers, and misalignment across teams.

For this Q&A, Catena Solutions spoke with Rachael Strieter, an Innovation and Portfolio Leader who has spent her career helping complex organizations identify, prioritize, and commercialize growth opportunities. Most recently, she served as Senior Director of Portfolio Operations at a global beverage company. In this conversation, she draws on more than 15 years of experience to discuss where beverage innovation slows down, what effective stage-gate processes look like, and how AI and risk-tiering can help teams move faster without cutting corners.

Where do you most often see stage-gate processes slow down?

When stage-gate feels slow, it’s usually because one stage is not working as intended, or because handoffs between groups are misaligned.

For example, at my most recent company, the issue was with bottler alignment. In the beverage industry, manufacturers don’t always own the means of production. That means bottlers or co-manufacturers must be aware and aligned early. I’ve seen situations where internal teams take ideas all the way through development, finalize formulas, reach launch preparation, and only then showcase their new innovation plan to the bottler. At that point, projects can sit for months in “launch prep” because the bottler has not been part of the decisions and isn’t ready to execute. That delay isn’t just a process delay; it’s a participation and trust issue.

Beyond stakeholder alignment, I often see slowdowns between gates when deliverables aren’t standardized and decision criteria are unclear. Teams can do the work and still be unsure whether the output is good enough to move forward because the success criteria weren’t defined up front.

What are the biggest signs a company’s stage-gate process is slowing innovation instead of enabling it?

If the process feels bureaucratic, impossible, or teams ask for exceptions—to skip steps or create an express version of the process—that’s a sign.

In a large company, many stage-gate activities aren’t optional. They reflect legal, regulatory, and operational requirements. So, when people want a shortcut, that’s a pain point to notice. The next step is diagnosing whether the pain is caused by a true process bottleneck or by capability gaps and misunderstandings across functions.

In my experience, it was often both. There were always opportunities to move faster, and at the same time, marketing teams sometimes underestimated the complexity of formulation, shelf stability, scaling ingredients, packaging interactions, and supply chain realities. When people don’t understand what other functions must do, impatience builds and the process gets blamed.

How much of the delay is process versus people and culture?

It’s usually both, but it’s heavier on the people and culture side.

You can improve the mechanics of a stage-gate process, but the hardest part is change management and capability-building. If the organization doesn’t have strong cross-functional collaboration, clear roles, and shared standards, the process will still feel slow.

I’ll add that rushing isn’t the same as speed. When we rushed projects and cut corners, those projects tended to fail. I also oversaw innovation write-offs, and I saw a pattern: when teams wanted exceptions or pushed through without the right processes, there were usually financial consequences later on.

An important fundamental is to review the pipeline and cull and prioritize projects. This is an exercise in project quality that adds up to pipeline health.  Is each project aligned with the growth targets for contributions, company volume, and revenue?  Are the number of projects of one brand or team over-indexing relative to their contribution to growth and therefore using more resources than merited? This can be even more important than project thresholds for volume or value. We all want to assume that what leaders and teams input into the process is aligned with growth targets, but it cannot be taken for granted.

“A healthy process reduces uncertainty. People appreciate the clarity and trust it creates. A broken process feels like bureaucracy and busy work.”

What organizational or cultural barriers tend to create unnecessary delays?

One big barrier is unclear ownership in a matrixed organization. Sometimes it’s who wants to be the innovation leader at the company—global versus regional markets. Sometimes it’s the center versus manufacturing. When it’s not clear who’s actually accountable for decisions, people duplicate work and slow each other down.

Another barrier is decision avoidance. If leaders are unwilling to say no, or if people are afraid to kill projects, the pipeline scope creeps. Pipelines can grow year over year until it becomes unrealistic to execute without burning people out.

There’s also the human dynamic on both sides of power. Sometimes a leader pushes a project that the team doesn’t believe in, and no one wants to challenge it. Other times, the team believes strongly in an idea and leadership stalls, asking for more analysis or another pilot.

What do beverage companies have to consider that other companies don’t?

The beverage industry has some distinct technical and commercial considerations. Liquids introduce packaging and closure interactions that are critical. Carbonation retention varies by package type. Liquids have stability and shelf-life considerations like discoloration and leakage that must be tested carefully. Ingredients like caffeine and sweeteners are heavily scrutinized, which creates additional regulatory and labeling attention.

From a commercial perspective, beverages can be highly seasonal and more intense in limited time offers. The pace of flavor cycles and “come and go” innovation can be demanding. That intensity shapes how quickly teams need to ideate, test, and execute, especially at scale.

How do you get leadership to make faster decisions without increasing risk?

Speed comes from reducing ambiguity. There are two ways that I recommend:

1. Clear decision criteria. Define success up front. What is the objective of the project? What needs to be true for it to move forward?
2. Clear decision rights. Be explicit about who has the decision and who provides input. Whether you call it RAPID or something else, the output matters. When people stay in their swim lanes, decisions move faster and are higher quality.

For larger innovation projects, pre-wiring also helps. Before a gate meeting, bring gatekeepers together a couple weeks early to preview what’s coming. Leaders can align with their teams, clarify positions, and avoid showing up cold. Then the gate meeting becomes a decision forum, not a discovery session.

Finally, define kill criteria early. When kill criteria are missing, the same debates resurface repeatedly, and projects don’t truly die.

“Teams don’t usually celebrate when projects are killed early. But I think celebrating projects that failed or were killed early and making that a KPI is a great way to highlight improved efficiency and learning by the team.”

Where have you seen AI help shorten development cycles?

I’ve seen AI used most in the front end of innovation: idea generation, early concept pressure-testing, and simulated consumer feedback. That can save time and money, especially when concept tests can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

AI also has potential for risk modeling and simulations in supply chain and product lifecycle considerations.

On the governance side, I expect AI to improve document generation and simplify the heavy lift of gate materials, pre-reads, and summaries. Tools have already reduced manual effort, but there’s still a lot of room to make the output sharper, shorter, and more decision ready.

“The key point is that AI compresses analysis and evaluation time. It does not replace human judgment. It makes the work people already do faster and potentially better.”

If you could recommend one single change to compress innovation timelines, what would it be?

It would be to create a risk-tiered stage-gate. Not every project needs the same process. There are “true innovation” projects (new products, new brands, significant line extensions) and “maintenance” changes (packaging tweaks, label updates, operational fixes). Both matter, but they should not move through the same level of analysis.

A risk-tiered model asks: What is the risk level of this project? That could include technical risk, financial risk, and consumer or brand risk. Based on that risk, define the depth of deliverables and the rigor required at each gate. Lower risk work still meets requirements, but it moves through a “quick and dirty” version. Higher-risk work would go through deeper diligence.

Do you have any other suggestions for improving stage-gate that we didn’t bring up?

I’d like to go back to reducing the learning cycle time and innovation culture in an organization.

Companies tend to measure volume, value, and overall time, but they don’t always measure how quickly they learn. There’s a case for making metrics like early kill rate, time between decisions, and stage time part of the KPI set. If you normalize killing projects early and celebrate saying no when it’s the right thing to do, you make the whole system healthier and more agile. If you try to innovate, you will fail; these failures need to be visible and constructive and celebrated as learnings.

I’m also thinking more about how AI and automation can enable governance in the innovation process. An example of potential automation, with some of the lower-risk or maintenance projects, I like the idea of “e-gating,” where instead of putting the project on a meeting agenda, leaders could review it electronically, click a link, check a box, and move it forward. Additionally, AI can be employed to support human decision making so that it is faster, easier, better, and more transparent. AI can review and synthesize large amounts of project details, perform risk analysis, scenario modeling, comparisons with other data sets to gauge success probability and highlight risks. This would make governance easier and faster, especially for projects that don’t require a full discussion.

To learn more about how Catena can help your organization with stage-gate or innovation, or to learn more about Rachael, get in touch here.