Itama: Gmail was a wonderful product that took on transformed email. We weren't there just to sell more ads, I can tell you. The fact that we were constantly striving to add more value and to make the product still relevant. And that's one of the key takeaways that I always teach, start with the customer, put them at the focus of everything.
“The difference of why some companies are so much more successful at producing high value, high-impact products than others comes to 4 areas of GIST (Goals, Ideas, Steps, Tasks)."
Itamar Gilad is a coach and author with over 20 years of experience in product management, strategy, and growth, and was previously a product manager at Google and the head of Gmail’s growth team. In this episode, we discussed all things about product management and how to build high-value products. Itamar first shared his journey at Google growing Gmail to 1 billion MAUs and some of his lessons learnt on managing large-scale product changes, getting users feedback, and dogfooding. Itamar then explained in-depth his GIST framework as an alternative to the product roadmap, a collection of methods and best practices for producing high-value and impactful products. He shared some challenges working with product roadmap and how teams can create better alignment instead. He also shared how we can do product prioritization better by using the ICE technique and his Confidence Meter. Towards the end, Itamar shared the different ways of how companies can conduct product experimentation and how to use the GIST board to improve the way we execute product development.
Listen out for:
- Career Journey - [00:04:17]
- Growing Gmail - [00:06:06]
- Managing Large Scale Product Changes - [00:07:26]
- Getting Feedback from a Major Product Change - [00:10:48]
- Dogfooding - [00:15:21]
- GIST - [00:19:10]
- Problem with Product Roadmap - [00:27:17]
- Creating Alignment - [00:34:22]
- Prioritization and ICE - [00:38:02]
- Doing Product Experimentation - [00:43:59]
- Project & Task Management - [00:48:43]
- 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:54:39]
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Itamar Gilad’s Bio
Itamar is a coach, author and speaker specializing in product management, strategy, and growth. For over two decades, he held senior product management and engineering roles at Google, Microsoft and a number of startups. At Google, Itamar led parts of Gmail and was the head of Gmail’s growth team (resulting in 1Bn MAUs).
Itamar publishes a popular product management newsletter and is the creator of a number of product management methodologies including GIST Framework and The Confidence Meter. Itamar is based in Barcelona, Spain.
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