FORGE turns the way a product gets built, killed, and shipped into a system you can configure — not a culture you have to hope for.
Six phases. Two council gates. Fifteen mechanisms. One framework.
If pilot CAC exceeds $310 by Wk 22, the product does not advance to Launch. Decision-maker: VP Product. Measured against actual pilot data, not the thesis.
FORGE ships as an elegant, interlocking system: editable templates for every deliverable, structural mechanisms that replace politics with rules, and archetypes that reshape the whole lifecycle to fit what you are actually building.
Net-new product. Full six-phase lifecycle, all deliverables, two council gates.
26–40 wksCo-developed with an external partner. Prove absorbs into Build. Shared kill criteria.
configuredInfrastructure others build on. Extended Build; Launch folds into Sustain.
30–48 wksCompliance-driven. The external clock dominates. Signal compresses to a week or less.
external clockExisting-product optimization. Three phases only. No council.
5–7 wksFurnace-native. No Pipeline entry unless extraction criteria are met.
8–12 wks+ Acquisition — enters at Build. The acquisition itself was Gate 1.
Pipeline ships products through six phases with two council gates. The Furnace explores ideas that don't have a business case yet, through fixed-clock modes. Both run at once. Separate governance keeps one from contaminating the other.
The cool lane. Disciplined commitment. Every product moves on a clock, through gates, against kill criteria that were written before anyone fell in love with it.
The hot lane. The second lung. Where ideas without a business case get explored on a fixed clock — and only graduate to Pipeline when evidence, not enthusiasm, says so.
Same product. Same market. Two paths. The FORGE path is drawn from a real maternity pilot run inside an integrated delivery system — the buyer, the gates, and the pilot results are what actually happened.
Stage-Gate is the framework most organizations already run some version of. Here is exactly where the two diverge.
Pipeline discipline kills exploration. So FORGE keeps a second lane with its own governance and its own clock — six modes for the work that isn't ready to be a product yet.
FORGE ships with interactive tools, 24 working-document templates, a business-case engine, and financial calculators — built so you can run the framework, not just read it.
Answer the questions in order. The first yes determines the archetype.
Most frameworks protect the organization from bad products. This one protects good products from the organization.
FORGE was built by Joe Nalley. He built and sold a 13-location integrated health system serving 200,000+ patients, and ClearBill, a billing-integrity platform that returned $9.2M to payers in its first six months of full deployment. Today he is Staff Vice President of Carelon Growth, Elevance Health's specialty health-services arm, where he owns six high-acuity clinical risk books across $50B+ in specialty medical spend.
The framework came from two sources: 50+ interviews with product leaders, medical directors, and operations executives who described the same failure modes — and direct operating experience inside an organization that had no version of any of this. The interviews confirmed the pattern. The operating experience bore it out firsthand.
The two-lane architecture came from a specific observation: organizations swing between rigor and agility, and every swing breaks whatever the last swing built. FORGE has two lanes because the pendulum is real.
Open FORGE, pick your constraints, and the engine builds the path — phases, deliverables, kill criteria, governance. Free, forever.