It would be great if you were able to record a product's life cycle status based on a customer-defined status list. It would be useful, if this information was also able to be used in both the release function and as part of an approval workflow. You should be able to override this status by legal entity to allow a product to be in different life cycle stages depending on market. Ideally, you should be able to associate policies with each life cycle to determine behaviour. This feature is useful across a number of industries including manufacturing, distribution and retail.