Stage-Gate / Phase-Approval Workflow

The problem this kills

Your project governance lives in a spreadsheet, a slide template, and a lot of email. A project "passes" a phase gate because someone said so in a meeting - but nobody can later prove the exit criteria were actually met, who approved it, or when. Projects sneak into the next phase before their checklist is done. Two people approve different versions. A gate gets recorded as passed twice. When an auditor, a sponsor, or a steering committee asks "show me the sign-off for Phase 2 on the Atlas project," you're digging through inboxes.

A stage-gate (also called phase-gate) process is supposed to be your safety rail: a project can't spend the next phase's budget until it has cleared the current gate. But a process that lives in spreadsheets and goodwill isn't a rail - it's a suggestion.

What you'll build

A small, login-protected web app for your PMO and approvers:

• Your gate definitions, data-driven. You define each phase, its entry/exit criteria checklist, and the people who must approve - all editable, not hard-coded.
• A clear gate view. When a project reaches a gate, the tool shows the exact criteria that must be true and the named approvers who must sign off.
• A real approval gate. Each required approver reviews the criteria and signs off. The project only advances to the next phase once every required approver has approved - never on one person's say-so.
• An advance-and-log action. When the gate passes, the project moves to the next phase, the event is written to an immutable audit trail, and the outcome lands in a CSV export your other systems can consume.
• Duplicate protection. A given project can't pass the same gate twice - the tool blocks it.
• Email notifications to approvers when their sign-off is needed and to the PMO when a gate passes.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code). It does the building; you steer.

• It opens by interviewing you about your business. Before writing a line of code, the plan makes the agent ask about your actual phases, your gate criteria, who your approvers are, how your projects are named and numbered, your volumes, and your real exceptions - so you get a tool shaped to your governance model, not a generic template. The agent reads back a short spec and waits for your thumbs-up before building.
• A step-by-step build, where every step ends with a ready-to-paste prompt.
• A data model for phases, gates, criteria, required approvers, projects, sign-offs, and the audit log - tuned to your answers.
• The login, the per-organization data isolation, and the audit trail wired in from the start.
• A "No API yet?" fallback so you can import your gates and projects from a Google Sheet or CSV today and export gate outcomes as a clean CSV - no integration required.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. Governance is built in by default, because a stage-gate tool that can't be trusted is worse than the spreadsheet:

• Login so only your team can use the tool.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own projects and gates.
• A complete audit trail - who checked which criterion, who approved which gate, and exactly when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the tool never advances a project on its own. Required approvers must each sign off, and only then does the phase transition commit.
• Duplicate guards keyed on project + gate, so the same gate can't be passed twice.

Who it's for

PMO leads, governance and steering teams, program managers, and project sponsors who need their stage-gate process to be enforceable and auditable - not just documented. If you run phase-gate, stage-gate, or tollgate reviews and you're tired of trusting that the checklist was really done, this is for you.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.