Question
What is quality gates workflow?
Quick Answer
Build verification points into workflows to catch errors before they propagate downstream.
Example: A product team ships a feature that breaks the checkout page. The bug was introduced during the design phase — a button was labeled "Submit" but wired to a cancellation endpoint. The design was reviewed by no one. The code was reviewed by a developer who didn't compare the implementation to the spec. QA tested only the happy path. Staging was skipped because of a deadline. Four checkpoints existed on paper; none of them caught the error because none of them asked the right verification question at the right moment. A single design review checkpoint — "Does every interactive element match its intended behavior in the spec?" — would have caught the bug six weeks before it reached a customer.
This concept is part of Workflow Design in the How to Think curriculum.
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Go beyond the answer
This topic is part of AI-Ready Operations — a guided sequence of 16 lessons.
After completing this path your operation will have processes AI can actually run: core workflows documented as atomic, triggered, checkpointed sequences; specifications precise enough that output comes back usable; handoff points made explicit; and monitoring, measurement, and recovery procedures that let you automate without losing control.
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