Product & Research Pipeline
We don't call it done until we prove it works.
On this page you can find the tracker of our research and software portfolio. We take an evidence-based approach to product maturity — that means we have clear passing criteria to determine the stage of our product offerings. It affects both how we structure engagements and our pricing strategy. See detailed explanation below.
Why stages matter
While our research tracking may look familiar, you may have noticed we approach software maturity with more rigor than a typical SaaS. If we advertise that a product helps your use cases, we provide sufficient proof and are transparent about how strong evidence currently is.
To give you some intuition of why we decided to extend the typical framework: "released" software highly varies in its maturity. A working product with no controlled evidence that it solves the problem at scale — we call this Lead Gen (MVP). Think early Notion, Linear or most AI startups today. A vendor with first real customers and "social proof" testimonials but no controlled measurements — that's Phase I (Release). Software that has become the go-to way to resolve its use case — Medidata for clinical data capture, ANSYS for engineering simulation, SAS for statistical computing — is what we call Industry Standard. All three are "released" in the conventional sense, but the distance between them is enormous.
Our philosophy: we price according to the stage. Early adopters who join at Phase I or Phase II lock in multi-year discounts that persist regardless of how fast we progress. For OSS products, the same applies to the controlled deployment and support tiers.
Product stages
Each gate below is the minimum bar to enter the next stage, not a marketing milestone. A landing page with no research behind it doesn't even reach Discovery. An enterprise product with 100M data objects processed and measured time savings is still not an Industry Standard.
| Stage | Meaning | Gate to next |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery (Prototype) | Research-backed problem framing, feasibility prototype | Validated hypothesis, decision to build |
| Lead Gen (MVP) | Core architecture, first working product | Functional MVP deployable internally |
| Safety (Alpha/Beta) | Controlled deployment (internal or external alpha/beta), synthetic and real-world stress testing | No critical failures under controlled conditions |
| Phase I (Release) | First external deployment, real users, real data | Stable in production, no safety incidents |
| Phase II (Scaling) | Multiple deployment sites, first controlled efficacy measurements | Quantified outcomes across independent sites |
| Phase III (Proven) | Large-scale deployments, statistical significance of customer KPI improvements | Meets criteria for industry standard |
| Industry Standard | The product is an industry-standard way for resolving the use case | — |
Research stages
| Stage | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Hypothesis | Idea, early exploration |
| Draft | Writing in progress |
| Preprint | Published on arXiv / bioRxiv, not peer-reviewed |
| Under Review | Peer review in progress |
| Published | Peer-reviewed, published in a trusted source |