VIEWPOINT
The What, Who and How of
Effective Gate Meetings
BY MATT PRIEST

Preparing for a New Product Development (NPD) gate meeting is usually the last thing on an innovation team leader’s list of things to do, especially when typical meetings entail lengthy slide decks on the merits of projects and research studies on the risks of new products. Gate meetings often require stacks of administrative paperwork and template after template of fact and figure tracking. Most people would probably rather spend their time creating than justifying.
Gate meetings can be faster, easier and more effective. Improve the “what”, “who” and
“how” of your meetings to make them less of a drain and more valuable for the organization. What?
The time spent preparing lengthy presentations places unnecessary administrative burdens on already constrained resources. Many templates often represent the same data communicated in different ways. This redundancy of information wastes time and opens the door for error, misrepresented data, flawed decision making and eventually mistrust in the process itself.
Address the “what” by standardizing the gate review template into a simple and effective document. Limit the presentation to a subset of data to focus the meeting on key project information and critical success factors such as strategic fit, size of prize, business unit impact, technical risk and likelihood of commercial success.
Who?
Most organizations already have a governance team in place to review projects and make decisions. But just having that team in place does not result in an effective gate meeting.
Successful organizations also establish an Innovation Process Manager (IPM). The IPM works with functional groups such as marketing, legal and finance to establish the deliverables due at each gate in the development process. Using this checklist, project leaders can be sure that their